Secret Service wants app store
The branch of the Treasury Department charged with protecting the president and the nation's financial systems is seeking industry input to develop its own resource for apps.
Secret Service agents wait for President Obama to finish signing memorabilia during a 2011 appearance at Gamesa Technology Corporation in Fairless Hills, Pa. (Secret Service photo by Pete Souza)
The Secret Service wants to start an app store that its employees could use to securely add capabilities to their mobile devices on the fly.
The agency issued a request for information on May 29 in FedBizOps concerning a mobile device management/mobile application store capability that would securely support a range of mobile operating systems, including Blackberry OS, Android, iOS, and Windows 8 across its operations.
The service is conducting market research to find sources that can provide integrated MDM/MAS solutions and services for up to 12,000 mobile devices. The solutions, it said, should be equipped with enterprise level controls to support protective and investigative mission requirements. The capability would support overall development of an agency mobility strategy and would apply to devices that store or process classified and unclassified data.
The service wants the store to enroll, secure, configure, monitor, manage and support mobile devices across its enterprise, supporting its varied duties.
The MDM/MAS, said the agency, should act as application and user level 'traffic cop,' enforcing group configuration policies for network and end devices and institute the policies, security measures and permissions that define the functions a given user could conduct on their mobile device. That capability, it said, would secure the entire user community from compromise from an incorrectly configured device.
Users should be able to perform a variety of functions with the MDM/MAS, including securing their applications including the ability to wipe devices and data remotely, remotely re-provision capabilities, and audit SMS messages, voice and video. The agency also wants to be able to centrally control privacy of data across all its mobile device groups, allowing managers to track and view MDM information with interactive dashboards, as well as enable "blue force" tracking and provide event/alerts notifications to IT administrators.