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CERTS NASCIO Recognition Award

By Lisa Leahy, OIT

Certificate Services (CERTS), has been recognized as a finalist in the NASCIO 2009 Recognition Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Information Technology in the category of Information Security & Privacy.  The awards are given annually to those states which have implemented exceptional programs that have made an important contribution to the operation of state government. 

The CERTS project started in the fall of 2006 with the development of a business case to plan for the replacement of wireless certificates which expired on December 14, 2007. Associate CIO Kathy Record, Project Executive Sponsor, Rachel Garippa, Project Manager, and Michael Pomerleau, Enterprise Systems Architect worked with a business stakeholders group representing a broad collection of Executive branch state agencies such as Professional and Financial Regulation, Maine DHHS Centers for Disease Control, Public Safety and the Judicial and Legislative branches of government as well as the Constitutional office of the Secretary of State. A cross discipline CERTS technical team was formed within OIT Core Technologies. Team members included Brian Desjardins and John Scott from Network Services, Lynn Muffett and Peter Bossie from Server Operations, David Murray and Michelle Bonner from Application Services, Michael McLaughlin and Kevin Freeman from Client Services, and Robert Witham and Kevin St.Thomas from the Security Office. Services consultant Brian Komar from Canada was contracted to provide design and deployment consulting services.

The team went through an educational process to understand how certificates working in a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can provide secure services between computers over diverse networks that had never previously contacted each other. That process culminated in June of 2007 with a recommendation to build a Certificate Authority based on federal government standards using Microsoft software with the initial focus on the delivery of certificates to internal State Wide Area Network (WAN) users and computers.

Please see www.nascio.org/newsroom/pressRelease.cfm?id=41 for the press release listing all of the 2009 Recognition Award honorees.