Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA) for government
Building communities of trust to share government information
Updated: September 10, 2007
Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Pandemic illness. Global warming. Economic disruptions. These are just some of the real and immediate threats confronting government in a post 9/11 world.
One thing is very clear. If governments are to face these dangers effectively, the first thing they must do is break down the barriers that prevent them from sharing and collaborating – during both emergencies and ordinary operations.
Huge challenges stand in the way. Stovepiped systems. Islands of incompatible information. Cultural, communication, and budgetary issues that prevent governments from sharing what they know in order to achieve what they’ve been entrusted to do.
The Secure Information Sharing Architecture (SISA) breaks through information-sharing barriers with a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that allows agencies to collaborate and communicate while protecting sensitive and classified content.
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What SISA delivers
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:
| • | Consolidates disparate systems and networks into a cost-effective infrastructure that secures, governs, and accelerates the distribution of mission-critical knowledge. |
| • | Defines an architecture of industry-standard components and existing infrastructure that protects shared data and systems with multiple layers of automated security. |
| • | Establishes an environment where organizations can share and govern their information across an extended enterprise of trusted information providers and consumers. |
| • | Enables agencies to implement a streamlined strategy for interoperability: where they can trust, they can share. |
Why SISA works
SISA enables government to set a united course of action, using all of its knowledge and marshalling necessary resources to confront threats and conduct day-to-day business. With SISA, government organizations can determine how, when, where, and with whom they will share their information—according to the requirements of the mission, not the constraints of technology or resources. Here's why it works:
| • | SISA is real. It's not a theory, wishful thinking, or vaporware. It's a fully defined architecture and implementation roadmap based on products that are ready for deployment today. |
| • | SISA is proven. It's based on COTS products, industry standards, and accepted best practices. It's backed by more than two years of development by a formal alliance between Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, and other IT innovators. The combined annual research and development budgets of these companies totals more than $12 billion, the benefits of which will accrue to SISA. |
| • | SISA is resilient. It's designed to requirements for multi-national military environments. It implements policy-driven defense-in-depth. It extends controls across the entire data path of information. It simplifies compliance and maintains secure audit trails. |
| • | SISA is agile. Agencies can automate authentication and authorization according to their policies. They can revise, limit, or withhold access as partners, roles, and responsibilities change. They can make services and information available as their circumstances demand. |
| • | SISA is sustainable. It lets government organizations address burning platform issues immediately. Then expand their information-sharing capabilities in progressive stages. |
| • | SISA is affordable. It builds on widely deployed infrastructure that agencies already have. It's based on widely available components. It requires a far smaller investment and far fewer resources than complex, proprietary systems that provide far less interoperability. |
| • | SISA is crucial. It started when government asked industry to "get together, and show us how to safely collaborate and exchange access." SISA is our response to that request—a completely developed, delivered, and supported solution for security enhanced information sharing. |
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