Confidential sharing for enterprises and governments

Most people accept that national intelligence organisations need a fair bit of `cloak and dagger’ support when it comes to moving and sharing the information they gather. But a growing number of commercial organisations now require exactly the same level of confidentiality, even if it is for commercial reasons rather than national `interest’.

But it is with both parties in mind that BAE Systems has come up with SIBA, which it announced at the end of last week.

SIBA is a tool that sets out to simplify secure data collaboration and dissemination for both government and commercial customers. It provides an innovative solution to secure information sharing for the nation’s Intelligence Community, as well as banks, law firms, and users of electronic medical records.

The solution works seamlessly with Microsoft Office and SharePoint, without modifying those applications, so should find ready accceptance across much of the commercial world.

“SIBA delivers a secure information sharing capability that is unprecedented and of critical importance for law enforcement and intelligence agencies”

A major markjeA major market, of course, is the Intelligence Community, which have a constant requirement to quickly migrate intelligence data to shared repositories, where it can be accessed securely in real-time by multiple users in multiple agencies. SIBA provides this capability to any government agency or business by leveraging their existing Microsoft Office and SharePoint investments.

Unlike competitor solutions, no additional investment is required for the development of new secure inter-agency clouds or other big data platforms to ingest, tag, replicate, and share information.

“SIBA delivers a secure information sharing capability that is unprecedented and of critical importance for law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” said DeEtte Gray, president of BAE Systems’ Intelligence and Security sector. “SIBA is helping to get critical intelligence into the hands of those who need it most by seamlessly integrating with the information sharing environment in place today. Our customers need to collapse infrastructure and take out costs, not build new large complex programs. SIBA will help them achieve that goal.”

SIBA enables analysts to tag (portion mark) specific characters, words, paragraphs, and images within their documents to define need-to-know access to portions of data. This allows other users, like field personnel and coalition partners, to access redacted versions of the intelligence product, based on network access and security clearance.

Additionally, the solution enables, by policy, further data redaction if information is being accessed by less-trusted mobile devices, or if access is from a less-trusted network. This overcomes the problem where reports that provide actionable intelligence relevant to field personnel are never received due to classification challenges.

Both governments and large enterprises have to weigh the ’need-to-know’ against the ’need-to-protect,’ and BAE claims that SIBA enables agencies to quickly and securely share actionable and relevant intelligence without compromising security.

Underpinning the security of SIBA is STOP 7, the same low-level security architecture utilised by BAE Systems’ XTS Guard. This was recently selected by the U.S. Department of Defense as its critical cloud-based enterprise security choice for cross-network data transfer.