NSW gov appoints IT consortium to improve password security

Project will manage passwords for state government users

Dataweave, Qubit Consulting, Oracle Australia and NTT Communications have been selected by the New South Wales government to deploy an identity management service, which will manage user accounts and passwords.

The consortium of vendors plan to implement an Identity Hub, which will manage all NSW government user identifications held in physical databases and the cloud. The project is expected to improve password security and reduce costs for the government.

The Identity Hub will be hosted in the NSW government’s data centres at Silverwater and Unanderra on an infrastructure-as-a-service platform, provided by NTT Communications, that uses Oracle hardware.

According to Dataweave managing director Norman Weaver, large organisations often face “serious challenges” when managing access to IT systems and data.

“The Identity Hub enables single sign-on across all NSW government agencies. This includes access controls for data spread across agencies," he told Computerworld Australia.

"The project will allow de-duplication of identities across the various agencies to ensure a user has only one identity within the NSW government. This will help improve data security."

Weaver added that Dataweave has done projects for NSW Health, NSW Transport and the Attorney General's office in the past.

"Those projects have spanned consulting, development and support services for Oracle database services, identity management and business intelligence [BI] technologies," he said.

While some cyber security experts have predicted the end of the standard username and password, Weaver said this would not be happening "anytime soon".

"Password management and access control applications will become more important as low security user passwords pose an unacceptable risk to many businesses. I believe multi-factor authentication will become increasingly common," he said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia

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