Page 58 - FCW, May/June 2018
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                                 FCWPerspectives
Getting smart about
intelligent automation
Agencies are looking to transform everything from contract writing to identity management. The trick could be getting governance to catch up to the tech.
 Federal agencies are drowning in data. Whether it’s network security logs, mundane financial transactions or satellite feeds and other mission-specific datasets, the volume has far outstripped the processing capacity of any human — not to mention that of many existing IT systems.
There’s tremendous
potential in all that data, however, and automation is essential to extracting it. FCW recently gathered a group of agency leaders to discuss the opportunities they see in their organizations and the challenges — technical, budgetary, cultural and otherwise — that must be addressed. Identity management was the use case that kicked
off the conversation, but participants quickly zeroed in on the underlying tensions that are complicating a far broader range of automation ambitions.
The conversation was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 52 for a list of participants), and the quotes below have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
Silos, snowflakes and overlapping solutions
Participants agreed that a main rea- son for the data overload is the fact that so many overlapping tools and systems are creating and touching it. Just for identity and access manage- ment (IAM), a single agency has half a dozen pilot programs underway.
“At the top level, you have attri- butes that are generic,” an executive from that agency said, “but as we go further down into those particular databases or authoritative sources, it quickly becomes more case-specific. But to avoid creating still more silos, you eventually bring them up to the airspace level.”
Different missions, meanwhile, bring unique constraints. “Ships at sea have only a thimbleful of band- width,” another participant noted. “I can’t do certificate revocation in real time over something like that when I’ve got mission data going up.” There are plenty of tools for almost every process, the executive added. But when 25 solutions cover 95 percent of the need, “there are about 175,000 overlaps, right? We’ve got to get out of that madness.”
Overlapping teams also complicate matters, especially for IAM. Access privileges vary widely, especially when a team spans multiple organizations, and the growing reliance on mobile
technology requires different sorts of authentication factors. “We have a mix,” one participant said. “That’s causing a problem.”
The group agreed that agencies too often wind up adding still more layers of complexity. “We take those tools and customize them,” one par- ticipant said. “Then they lose their ability to be fast, to be upgraded and to be migrated. It really is about pro- tecting the data. Unfortunately, some- times we have to put the shell around it because we need speed.”
Another participant was even more succinct. “It’s messy,” she said.
What automation can do for you
Several participants said a holy grail for IAM would be continuous multi- factor authentication that could man- age physical and digital access and be standardized across agencies.
“It would happen on entry,” one executive said. “Walking in the first turnstile, you look at the camera. Bet- ter than having a card. That entrance security system should notify the IT system that, ‘Hey, Bob just walked in the door.’” The camera on the user’s computer would verify that “that’s the same guy who walked in,” and anywhere that individual goes in the building, there “should be a sensor that knows, ‘Hey, that’s him. Yeah, he can come into this office. Or no, he
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