RISS Chooses AEP SmartGate for Communications Security
AEP’s VPN Solution Provides Federal RISS Program With Secure Information Sharing Environment
Established by the U.S. Congress and funded through a grant from the Depar tment of Justice, the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) Program enhances the ability of law enforcement member agencies to identify, target and remove criminal conspirators. RISS is comprised of six regional intelligence centers serving local, state, and federal law enforcement and criminal justice agencies in all 50 states, the District of Columbia,
U.S. territories, Canada, Australia, and England. The RISS Program suppor ts investigation and prosecution efforts against narcotics trafficking, organized crime, criminal gangs, and violent crime that span multi-
jurisdictional boundaries.
The Challenge
The major premise underlying the establishment of RISS is that law enforcement and criminal justice agencies in various regions of the country need to instantaneously communicate and coordinate the sharing of criminal intelligence information. Accordingly, the RISS centers had to implement technology designed to assist that cooperative relationship in a structured, efficient and responsible manner.
As RISS evolved, the centers implemented state-of-the-art hardware and database technologies, and also determined that there would need to be a means of affordable and secure data access. RISS wanted to leverage “Web technology” and the Internet to meet their objectives. They needed scalable security technology that would provide law enforcement officers secure, 24x7 access while ensuring specific access controls for authorized members, mutual authentication, and strong data encryption.
The Solution
The RISS Program chose AEP Smar tGate® to help secure their Internet-based network. AEP SmartGate client/server technology met RISS stringent requirements for an easy to manage single vendor solution that could scale to meet future expansion needs.
Given the RISS environment, it was impor tant that the AEP technology could work with a wide variety of authentication methods and devices. In addition, because it operates at both the network and application level, AEP Smar tGate allows secure and easy traversal of multiple firewalls without network address translation (NAT) issues.
Most significantly, the AEP solution could provide strong security for RISS while suppor ting powerful distributed administration capabilities, fine-grained access controls, and automated online user registration for ease of deployment.
The Result
In keeping with the mandate of Congress and the needs of the law enforcement community, the RISS network, and its databases, provides a highly secure information-sharing environment that is easily accessible via the Internet.. Authorized law enforcement personnel have immediate, secure remote access to information in RISS databases via AEP security technology.
Responding to the tragic events of September 11th, RISS has been recognized for the role it can play in support of homeland security to facilitate rapid communication and information exchange among member agencies. Presently, services are provided to over 600,000 sworn criminal justice officers in more than 5,600 law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, and membership is expanding daily.
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