Every government organization needs to manage technology infrastructure and assets through proper documentation and controlled tracking, ensuring a consistent level of operation under any circumstance. Mandatory policies have been enacted within government organizations to:
The Planet IRM product suite and associated solutions help Government customers:
- Assure the continuity and viability of Critical Infrastructures
- Analyze dependencies to eliminate any significant vulnerability to both physical and cyber attacks on Critical Infrastructure
- Identify, isolate, manage and respond expeditiously to detrimental events facing Critical Infrastructure functions and services
In order to facilitate best practices for these organizations, guidelines for such conformity have been established in several areas:
Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7 “establishes a national policy for Federal departments and agencies to identify and prioritize United States critical infrastructure and key resources and to protect them from terrorist attacks.” Currently, most government organizations do not have a cohesive database of the elements in their network infrastructure, relying rather on disconnected stovepipe applications such as Visio, Excel and AutoCAD. Planet IRM helps achieve total visualization and a thorough analysis of the entire network infrastructure via Planet’s Configuration Management System (CMS).
Department of Defense and civilian agencies have mandated the transition to IPv6 from the current IPv4, which increases IP addresses to 128 bit, has additional security enhancements and provides the ability to handle classes of service. Planet IRM has the capability to maintain IP address transition data and produce assessment reports for every device on the network to determine compliance with the new standard and establish whether or not each legacy device can be upgraded or will need replacement.
The US General Services Administration (GSA) has instituted the transition from FTS2001 and Crossover contracts to Networx for most government organizations, which mandates the consolidation of point-to-point circuits between various departments of an organization. The number of voice and data circuits required will be drastically reduced to create an optimized comprehensive network, using MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) for priority traffic handling. The first major transition will be within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create OneNet, where all departments of the DHS network will co-exist on one network.
Vendors who wish to participate in future government contracts that focus on infrastructure management must be Certified and Accredited (C&A) according to the Federal Information Security Management Act. An application that meets the requirements must be able to identify all components within the network infrastructure and maintain that each component has been certified and accredited, as well as record changes when non-certified components are replaced. Planet IRM is currently undergoing the stringent series of qualifications to achieve C&A status.
For more information on Planet’s existing GSA and SEWP teaming contacts, see the Government Contracts page. For greater details on commercial business issues, which also affect government organizations, please see the Enterprise Key Issues page.