CIO.gov Report Highlights Barriers and Gaps to Mobile Adoption in Federal Government

A recent blog on CIO.gov highlights a new report on mobile technology, if you haven’t checked out the report, be sure to take a look. You can find the full report here. The report provides insights on mobile technology and makes recommendations to encourage adoption of mobile technology that reduces costs and provides security for mobility. The blog announcing the report states:

The CIO Council has released a new report today under the Digital Government Strategy that details the use of mobile technology in the Federal Government (Milestone Action #10.2). The report will help inform efforts to accelerate the secure adoption of mobile technologies at reduced cost by identifying current barriers, gaps, and opportunities in the use of mobile technology.

This report is the result of a collaborative inter-agency effort that involved almost two dozen Federal departments and agencies and was led by the Information Security and Identity Management Committee (ISIMC) of the Federal CIO Council. The ISIMC conducted interviews with 21 agencies on their use of mobile technology for this report and made recommendations that aim to reduce cost and speed up adoption of secure mobile technologies.

One of the interesting sections of the report addressed various issues that still needs to be addressed for mobile adoption. The report provides three “gaps” that still need to be closed for more effective use of mobile technology, security/privacy, policy/legal, and application/infrastructure. In particular, the security and privacy section was interesting, the report states:

Gaps exist between Federal security and privacy requirements and the availability of products that implement the required protections:

• User authentication: Lack of a robust user identity authentication mechanism that complies with Federal mandates and maintains mobile device ease of use
• Data encryption: Growing need for validated, secure and efficient cryptography suitable for mobile devices;
• Application security testing and evaluation: Lack of automated tools for efficient assessment and authorization of mobile applications;
• Device Sanitization: Lack of agency processes and tools to follow requirements on device sanitization.

Be sure to take a look at the report, as it provides a great overview and look into some of the challenges around mobile adoption in the federal government.

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