infoTECH Feature

July 22, 2013

US Mint Awards $6M IT Services Contract to Cloudburst Security

The United States Mint has awarded Cloudburst Security – a women-owned small business (WOSB) that offers IT services designed to protect U.S. government networks and infrastructure from cyberthreats – a $6 million contract for the delivery of information technology (IT) security services.

Knowledge Consulting Group (KCG), one of the largest privately held cybersecurity firms in the U.S., is partnering with Cloudburst Security on the contract. The U.S. Mint manufactures and distributes circulating, precious metal and collectible coins and national medals.

“Our consultants are recognized throughout the federal government for their high-quality security analysis and reporting,” Andrea Suzara Bennett, president of Cloudburst Security, said in a statement. “This particular project will include security compliance, operations, engineering and management services to support the protection of the United States Mint’s IT infrastructure and enterprise.”

As a designated Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), KCG provides readiness and certification services to CSPs, helping to ensure the security of government information in the cloud. 

Under the terms of the contract, a team of IT security professionals will perform incident response, security testing, penetration testing, security engineering, as well as security auditing and compliance activities to meet the following objectives:

  • Address business/mission and IT security requirements for reducing risk and maintaining compliance for securing federal information systems;
  • Reduce IT security incidents, as well as improve IT security posture, data management and disaster recovery/continuity of operations backup in the distributed environment;
  • Support mission/business initiatives in accordance with applicable IT security standards, laws and regulations; and
  • Maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information systems and data stored in the systems.

While cloud adoption is picking up speed when it comes to the private sector, a recent study shows that the public sector is still well behind its counterpart. Andy Tait, the head of public sector strategy at virtualization company VMWare, says that the public sector certainly has a rather large interest in the cloud but that desire is not matching the level of adoption rates, reported TMCnet.

Some of the reason that public agencies aren’t adopting the cloud is because of the very real security concerns that still exist when dealing with certain companies. There are also some very basic roadblocks to adoption, such as existing contracts that can’t be terminated quickly enough.




Edited by Alisen Downey
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