From: GCN
By William Jackson
National security increasingly depends on the ability of agencies at the federal, state and local level to cooperate across organizational and jurisdictional lines.
“This cooperation, in turn, demands the timely and effective sharing of intelligence and information about threats to our nation with those who need it, from the president to the police officer on the street,” says the president’s National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding, released in December.
This requirement has been complicated by turf wars, siloed databases and a lack of interoperable technology and policies. The strategy calls for a shift to interoperable shared services (read: cloud) and integrated policies that will require system upgrades in what the strategy calls an “extremely austere budget environment.” In other words, don’t look for the needed improvements in the nation’s information sharing infrastructure to happen any time soon.
But the real headache in meeting the strategy’s goals will be establishing the common identity and access management schemes that are needed to enable secure sharing.
Today’s systems, policies and procedures were developed to lock information down, not to share it securely. The security posture has been defensive and outward-facing.
“The focus of information safeguarding efforts in the past was primarily bound to systems and networks at specific classification levels,” the strategy says. This focus will have to shift to the data itself, regardless of where or what it is, with common standards for tagging data with metadata to enable discovery across multiple databases and using common platforms for identity and access management.
It might be relatively easy to move federal, state and local intelligence to interoperable cloud platforms in standardized formats, although it will take money that is unlikely to be available any time soon. But common identity and access management schemes systems will be tough to do.
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