Ride the Lightning

Government Announces New Mobile Security Guidelines

May 30, 2013

Last week, White House officials announced a series of new resources and initiatives, including new mobile security guidelines, designed to help implement the administration's vision of delivering government information securely anytime, anywhere and on any device. A lofty vision, to be sure.

U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel and federal CTO Todd Park announced that the White House Office of Management and Budget has published the first government-wide set of mobile computing security guidelines. The guidelines include a baseline of standard security requirements for mobile computing, a mobile computing decision framework for federal agencies and a mobile security reference architecture.

The documents are significant not only in spelling out ways for agencies and industry to develop safer mobile products for use on government networks, but also because of the active roles played by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in developing them.

It was interesting to me that VanRoekel said, "The future for us is one where mobile is the default computing platform."

VanRoekel also announced the implementation of a government-wide digital analytics program across all federal websites. "That means for the first time, we have insight about what information the public is looking for, where they're looking for it and if they're able to find it — essential to our goal of easing access to government information," he said.

Beyond seeing big data as a way to glean useful information, the government hopes to make government websites "screen agnostic" so their content is accessible no matter how it is viewed.

For the federal government, this new series of resources and initiatives is shockingly practical.

Hat tip to Dave Ries.