Page 30 - GCN, Oct/Nov 2017

CLOUD
& INFRASTRUCTURE
Category Winner
At long last,
a common login?
Login.gov
18F, General Services Administration
Finalist
A one-stop shop for out-of-this-world multimedia
NASA Image and Video Library
NASA
At NASA’s 10 centers spread across the country, employees used to upload me- dia to individual sites, which made it dif- ficult to locate all the images of shuttle launches or jet propulsion work.
Furthermore, “the centers were all up- loading their media files a bit differently, so it was hard to move images from one site to another because they wouldn’t
be compatible or it would be difficult to find them,” said Rodney Grubbs, NASA’s imagery experts program manager.
Now employees and the public can access the searchable NASA Image and Video Library, which holds over 160,000 images, videos and audio files collected during 50 years of space exploration.
The website, which launched in March, also standardizes NASA’s media policies. “By standardizing our naming and metadata, it helps the centers find each other’s content and gives struc- ture,” Grubbs said.
NASA began working on the library three years ago after InfoZen won the Web Enterprise Service Technology contract to move the agency’s web ap- plications into the cloud. The library is hosted in Amazon Web Services’ cloud and uses Limelight Network’s content delivery network services to support a
Rather than trying to remem- ber separate logins for each government service, Ameri- cans might soon be able to forget all but one.
A team at the U.S. Digital Service and the General Services Administra- tion’s 18F created login.gov, a shared identity authentication solution that lets people use a single sign-on to securely access services from multiple agencies.
Agencies stand to gain from the service, too. Many have multiple login systems, but the cloud-based login.gov promises to eliminate that clutter and save money because agencies won’t have to repeatedly pay for identity proofing.
“This allows their developers to, within hours, be able to integrate in a development environment and to be able to integrate the login.gov technol- ogy so they can control their mission, which is to provide their service to
the user,” said Joel Minton, director
of login.gov. “And we can control the login experience, which makes it a
lot easier for the agencies to focus on
what’s important to them.”
Privacy, security and usability were
the team’s goals. “We have an encryp- tion algorithm [that] is extremely strong and actually uses the user’s password and recovery code to encrypt the data, which means that we can secure the data with much higher confidence,” Minton said.
When visitors to federal websites click the login button or the service they want to access, the site redirects to login.gov, where users can set up an account or sign in to an existing one. Then the system sends them back to the agency’s site to continue on their path, he added.
Login.gov is the government’s fourth attempt at a centralized identity management solution. Minton credits its success to top-level support and voluntary use. “Right now we want
to just help agencies come onto the platform and make sure it’s better than any other solution,” he said.
30 GCN OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 • GCN.COM