CIO Council: Protect your architecture data

The CIO Council yesterday reminded agency CIOs to guard their enterprise architecture information and applications as closely as their core systems.Energy Department CIO Karen Evans, vice chairwoman of the council, said the memo to CIOs was a pre-emptive step. She said some agencies have been concerned about the integrity of their architectural plans after federal agents raided Ptech Inc. of Quincy, Mass., last month. Ptech provides enterprise architecture modeling software to the Air Force, Energy and the FBI, among other agencies. Although the vendor was cleared of wrongdoing and there were no problems with its software, the situation made “everyone stop and think about how they were securing their EA information,” Evans saidThe memo said the Office of Management and Budget expects agencies to discuss how they will secure their enterprise architectures in their next quarterly updates of security action plans and milestones.The council noted that architecture information should be considered mission-critical, and that agencies should use measures outlined in the Government Information Security Reform Act, which will evolve into the Federal Information Security Management Act. FISMA passed as part of the E-Government Act of 2002, signed into law last month.