In a report to Congress earlier this year, Office of Management and Budget Director John Berry cautioned that information security is one of the challenges to maintaining a US government telework program. A full 38% of federal agencies identified information security as a “major barrier” to telework by federal employees, the report noted.
To address information security concerns posed by teleworking, Unisys is offering its Unisys Stealth Solution for Secure Virtual Terminal (SSVT), which resides on a federal government-certified USB device. The SSVT uses advanced cryptography to secure data on shared networks.
“We are trying to assist those people who want to do federal-oriented telework to comply with the security access regimen that is already in place….We have an implementation that is easily deployed within their existing typology, and we are trying to help them comply with the goals of having one-third of [the federal workforce] become teleworkers”, said Mark Feverston, sales vice president for technology consulting and integration solutions at Unisys.
Feverston explained that the SSVT combines Unisys Stealth Solution for Network with a customized portable USB device that allows a remote user to boot up and establish a secure session linking to an enterprise network. The Unisys product creates virtual communities of interest, groups that can share the same physical or virtual network without fear of another group accessing their data or workstations and servers. The SSVT also protects teleworkers from malware, he added.