GSN_HSA2017_Yearbook

2017
GSN 2017 DIGITAL YEARBOOK OF HOMELAND SECURITY AWARDS RECIPIENTS
State of Montana
2017 Winner
Awards Category:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Most Notable State Government Security Program,
Project or Initiative
Name of Nominated Product, Service,
or Program:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
State Information Technology Services Division
(SITSD), State of Montana
Reason this entry deserves to win:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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 vari-
GSN 2017 Government Excellence Award
ous agencies across the state.
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:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
https://sitsd.mt.gov/
Link to additional information:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Ron Baldwin, Chief Information Officer
State of Montana
office: 406-444-2777
Nominating contact email address:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
RBaldwin@mt.gov
Nominating organization address:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
State of Montana
Department of Administration
125 N. Roberts
Helena, MT 59620
122 123