Louisiana expands secure authentication for government services
06 September, 2017
category: Digital ID, Government
A new push to enable secure authentication for government services in Louisiana is expanding from its initial focus on health care services to cover all of the state’s 16 government agencies. The project, which involves CA Technologies and the State of Louisiana Office of Technology Services, aims to set a secure authentication standard across state government.
The goal is to implement identity and access management solutions across government agencies to further digitize and better protect state and citizen information
Called the Louisiana Enterprise Architecture project, the program launched in 2014 and, according to CA Technologies, “initially focused on improving the state’s Medicaid Eligibility and Enrollment System for nearly 1.5 million Medicaid recipients.” Now CA Technologies has announced that it has extended its partnership with the state technology office. The goal? “To implement identity and access management solutions across government agencies to further digitize and better protect state and citizen information,” CA Technologies said.
“Facing a challenging procurement process, budget restraints and federal mandates, we knew from the beginning that we needed to develop a system that not only works today for one agency, but would work for multiple agencies for years to come,” says Matthew Vince, chief design officer, State of Louisiana Office of Technology Services. “We also knew that, ultimately, for the system to succeed, it needed to be both secure and easy to use.”
How citizens use secure authentication for government services in Louisiana
Security, of course, is key to this project. CA Identity Manager handles authentication of people accessing government services. “Signup is funneled from a consuming application such as eligibility and enrollment to the single sign-on service,” Vance explains. “From there, the consumer can create and verify their account (via SMS or email), log in, and continue back to the consuming system. ID proofing services are provided if the consuming application requires that level of integration.”
While no system can prevent all fraud, he says, “the tools and layers of security developed into this system make it easier to identify fraudulent usage,” than was the case before the CA Technologies partnership.
Expanding the scope of secure authentication for government services in Louisiana is not the only ongoing work being performed with CA Technologies. Service improvements also are taking place, Vance says. “We have designed a highly-available—that is, active across two datacenters—cloud enabled, hyper-converged platform, which provides superior performance and uptime as compared to our traditional stack,” he says. “Additionally, the utilization of service based design—whether service oriented architecture or microservices, or in-between—is allowing our systems to better communicate in real time, leading to better performance outcomes.”