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Deadline Extended for IDAM Responses

The deadline has been extended until next Friday for vendors to submit questions to a state agency about an RFI pertaining to identity and access management solutions.

The deadline has been extended until next Friday, Feb. 2, for vendors to respond to an RFI from the California Health and Human Services Agency's (CHHS) Office of Systems Integration (OSI), pertaining to identity and access management solutions.

"We are encouraged by the activity so far and want to give vendors additional time to participate," said Bill Maile, communications director for CWDS.  

OSI is exploring identity and access management (IdAM) offerings that are in broad use industrywide and that have been shown to be robust and scalable enough to be used across all state agency departments and projects.

The RFI contains the following premise: "As part of the transformation of CHHS to a 'leverage or be leveraged' culture, CHHS leadership created the Information Strategic Plan, which identified several Information Technology (IT) target areas to focus on for developing as shareable services." 

According to the RFI, there are numerous benefits to creating and implementing an IdAM solution that would work statewide:

  • Allows for reliable identification of participants in electronic interactions. In more general terms, an IdAM solution allows enforcement of business policies that involve identity and access to resources, with a view to enable online interactions in the first place
  • Increases reliability and efficiency in managing internal (within the organization) and external users by adopting proven and consistent solutions; the efficiency of this managing has an impact on the level of organizational agility, in terms of the organization’s ability to accommodate changing applicable regulations or statutes, changes in user base, or simply making new functions or services available quickly and reliably
  • Improves resilience to identity-based security attacks in addition to improving the ability to detect such attacks
  • Simplifies security aspects of integration of business applications, and consequently increases flexibility in creating new or modifying existing business processes by providing an enterprisewide IdAM shared middle-ware layer
  • Supports future evolution of security aspects of internal applications and of integration with external service providers by adopting open standards and standardized APIs
  • Enhances usability for end users by supporting Single Sign-On (SSO) and Cross-Domain Single Sign-On (CDSSO), Single Logoff, and Federated Identity Management (FIM). 
The contact person for vendors responding to this RFI is Brian Stiger Jr., (916) 263-4278. 

Dennis Noone is Executive Editor of Industry Insider. He is a career journalist, having worked at small-town newspapers and major metropolitan dailies including USA Today in Washington, D.C.