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DHS to Make Federal Employees’ Electronic Devices more Secure

August 9, 2016

The Department of Homeland Security is focused on making the mobiles and other electronic devices of the federal employees safer and secure. The department is doing so after getting a mandate from the lawmakers a few months back. The department is currently gathering data from the experts and aims to use it to identify and deal with potential threats.

Why DHS is working to Make Federal Employees’ Electronic Devices

Secure

DHS is working so hard to make the mobiles and other electronic devices safer because of the Omnibus bill that was passed by the congress in December 2015. The bill included section 401 of the Cyber security Act of 2015 which made it mandatory for DHS to carry out a study of the current mobile security methods and reveal whether these are enough to deal with the mobile security challenges.

The Aim

The aim of the study being conducted by the DHS is to identify all the threats to cyber security of federal networks and information. After the identification, the organization would develop recommendations on addressing the threats. The recommendations would be as per the industry best practices and industry standards. The organization is also supposed to create a plan that assures accelerated adoption of highly secure mobile device technology.

It is pertinent to add here that the study excludes the Department of Defense and other agencies that fall under the category of the intelligence community.

The Input

As the DHS is following the orders, it is getting assistance from experts of the Wi-Fi and cellular industries as well as the academic experts by initiating a request for information (RFI). The information needed by the DHS includes information on services, products, technologies and capabilities. The deadline for the responses is August 22, 2016. The information collected would not lead to any instant action or issuing of new contracts. The information is being gathered just for planning and market research purposes. In the RFI, the respondents are asked to identify considerations and constraints that affect the mobile and other technologies. They are also asked to give recommendations about how the situation can be improved.

The Scope

The scope of the information collected by the DHS includes not only the smartphones and tablets used by the federal employees. It also includes operating systems, mobile apps and other embedded components of mobiles like enterprise mobile services and infrastructure, baseband radios and wireless networks.