Government Security News 2016 Digital Yearbook

2016
State of Montana
2016 Winner
GSN 2016 DIGITAL YEARBOOK OF HOMELAND SECURITY AWARDS RECIPIENTS
Awards Category:
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Most Notable State Government Security Program,
Project or Initiative
Name of Nominated Product, Service,
or Program:
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State Information Technology Services Division
(SITSD), State of Montana
Reason this entry deserves to win:
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SITSD has been working to increase visibility in agencies
across the state of Montana including Health & Human
Services, the Department of Revenue, the Department
of Administration and the Judicial Department, through
the use of Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise
Security. SITSD utilizes this platform to improve the
security posture of the state, and is doing so through
troubleshooting and other crucial capabilities. The
SITSD team is also now able to monitor multiple security
categories – including information across the network,
directories, web filtering, DNS and virtual servers
– as well as the security bandwidth of various agencies
across the state.
GSN 2016 Government Excellence Award
Within SITSD, security teams now have the ability to
build and use threat intelligence dashboards, providing
visibility into all threat intelligence activity across the
network. Using these dashboards, the team automatically
accesses datafrom agencies across the state within
minutes to assess and mitigate potential threats. Prior to
implementing the security platform, the team manually
retrieved this information, which was very time consuming.
Security personnel can now pull data from multiple
sources into one pool for unified search discovery and
troubleshooting. Examples are Firewall, Websense Filtering,
Netscaler, Active Directory Auditing, DNS, and VM
machine access.
In addition to these new capabilities, teams within
SITSD have begun to function in a proactive manner
rather than in the reactive way they functioned prior to
deploying the platform. They can now fully understand
their threat environment and monitor all types of data,
which has led to a major increase in efficiency and information
sharing across Montana. The state no longer has
to assess threats on a case-by-case basis, and can more
efficiently and effectively protect the data of the state,
and therefore its citizens.
This program has become a critical tool for Montana’s
network. “Any time we have network or content
filtering issues, our go-to is Splunk. Previously, troubleshooting
issues could take hours, and multiple people
across different bureaus working together as the logs
were from several sources,” said Randy Haefka, Enterprise
Support Services Section Supervisor, Enterprise
Technology Services Bureau, SITSD/Montana Department
of Administration. The team now has all of its
tools and information centralized on one platform,
which further enables it to be proactive and maintain
the integrity of the state’s network.
Link to Web Page of Nominated Organization:
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https://sitsd.mt.gov/
Link to additional information:
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The State Informational Technology Services Division is part of
the Montana Department of Administration. The mission of the
State Information Technology Services Division is to provide
shared IT services to support the needs of the state and citizens
of Montana:
http://sitsd.mt.gov/Services-Support/Enterprise-
Architecture
Independent media coverage:
http://sitsd.mt.gov/News-Events/PID/22417/evl/0/
CategoryID/125/CategoryName/Current-SITSD-
News
Nominating contact for this entry:
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Ron Baldwin, Chief Information Officer
State of Montana
office: 406-444-2777
Nominating contact email address:
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RBaldwin@mt.gov
Nominating organization address:
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State of Montana
Department of Administration
125 N. Roberts
Helena, MT 59620
90 91