Engagement Options

HSPD-12 Readiness Assessment

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/hspd-12.html) is a mandatory U.S. Presidential directive to establish a common identification standard for all Federal Government employees and contractors. Between 2006 and 2007, the US Government plans to provision over 40 million smart cards for digital identification of all government agency employees and contractors. The smart cards, in the form of ID badges, will contain user identity information and applications (applets) on 64K chips that will be capable of authenticating and authorizing user access to facilities, secure networks, and numerous other services.

HSPD 12 is a component of a much larger a set of related identity management (IdM) issues. Burton Group's "HSPD-12 Rapid Assessment" program commits to deliver a focused vendor independent analysis of your IdM strategy, security infrastructure and overall preparedness to effectively support HSPD-12. If HSPD-12 compliance is a top priority for your organization, you should be considering the following:

• Do you have an effective action plan for integrating HSPD-12 into your agency's strategic longer term enterprise plan for Security/Identity/Privacy infrastructure?
• How does your agency "rate" when it comes to its HSPD-12 readiness plan?
• Is your current HSPD-12 deployment plan too reliant on an individual smart card vendor's proposed rollout "strategy"?
• Do you have or are you putting in place the required components, security services and related audit trails to support a successful HSPD-12 deployment?
• Have you assessed HSPD-12's impact on your existing IT Infrastructure? (i.e. legacy applications)

The outcome of this short-term engagement provides you with a thorough understanding of your agency's strengths and weaknesses by assessing how your existing identity management infrastructure and strategy can best support your HSPD-12 requirements. This assessment examines your user identity lifecycle infrastructure, credential assignment, management and revocation, user identity data mapping and propagation to the Card Management System and identity audit and reporting.

We accomplish this assessment by electronically surveying up to 10 key 'stakeholders' drawn from cross-functional groups including IT, Security, Architecture, Human Resources, Application Development, Networking, and other 'line of business' executives concerned with identity management integration with HSPD-12 supporting infrastructure. We'll even help you identify the right people to contribute to the survey. We also review the relevant HSPD-12 design and architecture documents maintained by your agency in order to get a focused and thorough understanding of your HSPD-12 supporting infrastructure and strategy. Specific topics investigated include:

• User lifecycle management
• Automated and manual account and entitlement provisioning
• HSPD-12 repository (database/directory) schema
• HSPD-12 repository topology
• Card management system integration
• Identity content and data integration
• Federated authentication
• Identity audit and reporting

After receiving the completed surveys and reviewing your documentation, Burton Group senior level consultants will spend one full day on-site with your team to review the survey responses and correlate this information with your documented infrastructure and strategy.

Following this on-site meeting, Burton Group will provide you with a 15 to 20 page written HSPD 12 Readiness Assessment. The assessment will include a series of tactical and strategic recommendations in those areas identified above, in order to move your HSPD-12 supporting infrastructure forward based on industry best practices, technological capabilities, your agency's unique requirements and other specific findings of the assessment.

To start this engagement:

If you work in the Eastern US or Europe, call Homan Farahmand at 905.952.0966

If you work in the Western US or Asia Pacific, call Doug Simmons at 831.429.4001