BOLDON JAMES SECURE INFORMATION EXCHANGE (SIE) ARCHITECTURE
By James Kidd, Strategic Marketing Manager at Boldon James
This feature written by James Kidd (Strategic Marketing Manager at Boldon James), describes the value of Boldon James’ Version 3 (V3) product set, and how it aligns with Microsoft’s Unified Communications vision for the defence, intelligence and government markets. Boldon James’ next generation architecture is component-based, enabling the portability of our highly successful Exchange/Outlook based Email functionality to other Microsoft conferencing and collaboration platforms such as SharePoint, Office Communications Server (for voice & video conferencing), LiveMeeting and Live Communications Server (for instant messaging and chatroom based operations) and Office Documents.
Boldon James
Boldon James, now part of QinetiQ, develops security, identity and assurance enhancements to Microsoft collaboration platforms for defence, intelligence and government security organisations. Our flagship product, SAFEmail is a plug-in for Exchange and Outlook Email, providing complex identification, security and information assurance functionality that meets NATO/CCEB standards and helps enforce defined security policies. For our Defence customers our solution set includes all the application components that make up a typical Military Message Handling System (MMHS) including secure e-mail, directories, guards and gateways. We have over 1.6m users deployed across 60 organisations in 14 countries. The Boldon James V3 architecture takes this success into the wider secure information exchange environment that characterises our customers’ need to securely communicate messages, meaning and intent by the most appropriate method to hand; be that voice, video conference, document, instant message or email.
“The closer the customer gets to deploying the full Microsoft Unified Communications vision, the greater the business value that is achievable through Boldon James functions which automates key military business processes and enforce security policy within the secure information exchange environment” comments Wayne Phillips (Defence & Public Security Lead, Microsoft).
Secure Information Exchange (SIE) environment
This environment incorporates many COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software products each with their own specific security add-ons, but with only limited or no integration between them, making for many usability constraints. The undeniable value of information proliferation has also seen a significant evolution of requirements in recent years across military and intelligence markets for the secure exchange of information, namely:
• An emphasis on the need to share, as opposed to the ‘need to know’: the value of making specific information widely available to all individuals concerned with collecting intelligence, saving lives or maintaining national security, requires a move away from business processes designed to maintain barriers that focus on restricted access.
• Communities of Interest (CoI): COTS technologies make possible the communication of intelligence, operational activity and basic social needs between many hundreds of thousands of people within and between organisations. Correlating specific information alerts with appropriate interest groups requires sophisticated mechanisms to resolve the relationships between users, roles and information requirements.
• Push-pull: Enabling users to populate relevant-only data into their frame of reference via ‘pull’ criteria solves many overload issues brought about by more prolific push technologies.
• Knowledge At the Point of Action (KAPA): Consolidating mechanisms, views and filters that make frame of reference data available from multiple sources so enabling timely, fast and effective decision making.
Many individual technologies are now becoming available that separately address issues within this environment, but none that integrat