Government agency innovates to adopt smartphones

The National Security Agency recently announced it will soon allow employees to use mobile devices, once the agency develops a secure and advanced mobile device management strategy for keeping documents and private information out of the hands of hackers, InformationWeek recently reported.

The security requirements are now extremely strict for NSA employees, who are required to leave their mobile devices in their cars in the parking lot as opposed to bringing them inside the workplace, according to the source. That might soon end, as the intelligence agency is working to create a series of security requirements for mobile devices. The agency is currently running pilots on customized mobile devices that are available commercially in order to collect information on their performance and usability.

NSA's mobility mission manager Troy Lange told InformationWeek that people desire to use their consumer devices to access corporate networks, which would allow employees to use technology that they utilize in their everyday lives and increase the efficiency of the agency.

Lange added that consumer devices are not built with security in mind as their primary market differentiator, which raised the question of how the agency will be able to secure the mobile devices so that they can access the agency's IT infrastructure.

The agency is considering the SE Android, which is a more secure version of the Android operating system that was developed by the NSA's trusted systems research organization in January, reported IW.

The SE Android provides stronger ways to secure applications and forces devices to share data and files in a secure manner. The NSA believes that the security upgrades will help prevent malware attacks and will thwart hackers from accessing the system.

"All this work will allow us to get out of the business of having to build our own devices," said Lange. "We're not looking at a government-specific build of the Android operating system, but we want to take advantage of something like this as a component of an overall, industry-provided solution. We want to be able to provide mobile devices, but we want to avoid modifications as much as we can."

The NSA will widen its outreach in the next few months with the technology industry to see how they can contribute to the project of enabling BYOD in the agency, according to the source.
If approved for the mobile devices, the leaders of the government agency will join the 88 percent of executives recently surveyed who reported they were using personal computing technologies for business purposes.