SISA Data Sharing Architecture

Cisco Systems, EMC and Microsoft announced the formation of a consortium yesterday to help the government develop ways to more efficiently and securely share information. The Secure Information Sharing Infrastructure (SISA) is the venture which will provide services and technology to the Federal government and, eventually, the private sector.

The Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA) breaks through information-sharing barriers with a COTS solution that allows agencies to communicate and collaborate while protecting sensitive internal content. It enables government to consolidate disparate systems and networks into a cost-effective infrastructure to help secure, govern, and accelerate the distribution of mission-critical knowledge.

SISA combines products from Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft with best-of-breed solutions from Liquid Machines, Swan Island Networks, and Titus Labs to address the urgent need for sharing sensitive materials across organizational, IT, and jurisdictional boundaries. With SISA, organizations can participate with confidence in communities of trust because they have the controls they need to precisely govern how their information is accessed and used.

SISA lets information owners determine how, when, where, and with whom they will share their materials – according to the requirements of the mission, not the constraints of technology or resources.

SISA was created in response to the need for sharing information – a need which is often at odds with security. Each of the vendors was hired separately by various agencies of the government to address the same repeated issues. SISA forms a more unified – and therefore more solid and cost effective – approach to the issues.

The three vendors teamed up in order to provide the best possible data sharing solution. SISA will provide the products, leaving agencies to security policy planning rather than implementation. The alliance already includes other partners; Liquid Machines, Swan Island Networks and Titus Labs, and the list of members is expected to grow.

Grace Mastalli, Homeland Security’s former director of information sharing and collaboration, told InformationWeek that SISA will provide infrastructure the government has been talking about for many years, but has been unable to create on their own.

SISA services will initially includes 4 areas:

1. Access protection – secure network connections and identity management
2. Content protection – controlling access to information
3. Data protection – securing information
4. “Watchdog” services – system performance and data flow

Visit the SISA site to read examples of how SISA works.

Via InterGovWorld & InformationWeek Tags: sisa, it, microsoft, cisco, emc, security, government security, data sharing, it, government it