GSA pushes forward with TIC initiative

FederalNewsRadio.com

The General Services Administration announced in mid-December that it awarded its first MTIPS, Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services, contract to AT&T through Networx Universal.

Frank Tiller , GSA's director of the service development division in the Integrated Technology Service's office of the Federal Acquisition Services, tells FederalNewsRadio that GSA was anxious to move on its first Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) -related contract and that AT&T was the first to propose an all encompassing solution.

"AT&T was the first to provide an acceptable total solution in terms of the technical capabilities and fair and reasonable pricing," Tiller says.

Under the TIC initiative, Tiller explains that AT&T will provide a range of services aimed at meeting every agency's cybersecurity needs.

Our requirements, basically, take what requirements were developed jointly by all the agencies with DHS and we make sure that the carriers are able perform those and we provide einstein filtering, diverse internet connections and a security operations center that does traffic filtering to make sure that the agency's traffic is protected from threats external to their network.

Tiller says this traffic filtering service checks for malicious patterns adding another layer of protection on top of the Einstein intrusion detection system..

"We filter to look for certain known attack patterns. It's like a double protection in that einstein is looking for global view of how the government networks are functioning and we have the security operations center that tries to rapidly protect individual agencies," Tiller says.

Tiller explains that the next step for agencies interested in the service is to contact DHS and sign a memorandum of understanding in order to secure the monitoring capability then order it under Networx.

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On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio - DHS to test Einstein version 3

GSA - GSA Press Release

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