Australian state agency gets IM upgrade

17.11.2005
The Department of Emergency Services of Australia's Queensland state is embarking on a complete identity management revamp, concentrating first on secure remote access.

The project, expected to take about two years, will eventually be rolled out to 7700 full-time staff and 85,000 volunteers but initially will concentrate on using SSL VPN encryption to securely offer volunteers training from the Department of Emergency Services intranet.

The department is responsible statewide for all emergency and disaster management, response and recovery for fire, ambulance and rescue services, including the rural fire service, and surf life saving. The project starts in the next two weeks.

Paul Jose, information security manager for the Queensland Department of Emergency Services, said they started looking at consolidating their remote access strategy four months ago, because of the current "mixed bag" of remote access applications.

"We needed an SSL VPN solution to eventually be used by general staff for access to our portal and access for technical people, communications, desktop support and field operations, as well as providing remote access to fire officers and the like so they get up-to-date information as required," Jose said.

"We do have future business initiatives which will have devices in ambulances for online patient information; we will eventually have devices such as online streaming in fire trucks and video at firefronts, so scalability and management was important to us.