In a blog, Spires explained that as part of his department’s cloud-first policy, a number of services have been shifted to both the DHS private cloud and public cloud.
One of the private cloud initiatives is AaaS, which provides on-demand verification using a one-time password. Spires said that AaaS helps reduce costs, improve security, and bridge the authentication gap between federal employees and contractors.
Other DHS private cloud initiatives include business-intelligence-as-a-service, case-and-relationship-management-as-a-service, development-and-test-as-a-service, email-as-a-service, production-as-a-service, project-server-as-a-service, SharePoint-as-a-service, and workplace-as-a-service.
In addition, as one of its public cloud initiatives, DHS is implementing an identity-proofing-as-a-service solution, which is designed to verify the status of US workers employment eligibility on E-Verify Self Check. More than 60,000 workers have used IDPaaS, Spires said. Other public cloud initiatives include enterprise-content-delivery-as-a-service and web-content-management-as-a-service.
Spires stressed that all of his department’s cloud initiatives meet Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation standards.