From ICAM Prototype to an Exclusive OTA Award in support of DISA

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) program is a coordinated effort to establish a federated identity service for the agency and its mission partners. In its search for a partner on the ICAM effort, DISA accepted dozens of industry proposals and selected just six to present their solutions. DISA then down-selected two companies to participate in a 45-day proto-type effort to prove out their solution. Each company’s team was challenged to design and build its own system that could accomplish the goals of the effort: mitigate current inefficiencies, facilitate strong authentication to state of-the-art cloud services, provide authorization services with role-based access, and enable better and faster audits of users and resources.

At the conclusion of this Technical Phase I period, the GDIT team was exclusively awarded a 15-month Production Prototype project under the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) procedures. OTAs are designed to increase speed to capability for solutions not available in the current market. It enables an agile process and requires close collaboration with both the contractor and the DoD. During this time, the GDIT team will demonstrate the value of its solution in a production environment and, if successful, will have positioned itself to deliver a modern, enterprise ICAM solution to the DoD, which is a critical pillar of its cybersecurity strategy and its ultimate push toward a Zero-Trust architecture.

So, how’d we do it?

• First, our solution brought together three industry-leading, best-of-breed technologies – Identity Provider (IdP), Automated Account Provisioning (AAP), and Master User Record (MUR) – into an integrated framework that met DISA’s requirements. Together, these tools and a built-for-purpose framework delivered the results DISA was looking for and that they can expect for the long haul.

• Second, we viewed the solution and the selection process as a crucial opportunity to demonstrate to the DoD that we are invested in and committed to this ever important and growing market space. We also saw it as an opportunity to showcase our GDIT Emerge lab environment, which is what enabled us to quickly and successfully design a winning prototype. The lab, and our team’s ability to leverage it for the innovations it was intended to foster, is a tremendous example of the priority that GDIT – organization-wide – places on innovation.

• Finally, in accordance with the opportunity’s guidelines, GDIT assembled a team of “non-traditional” small business partners, each a leader in their niche market space. This approach – which allowed us to identify highly specialized partners who, because of their size, could be laser-focused on this opportunity – meant we could quickly collaborate and expertly deliver in the moment.

This opportunity highlights the best of GDIT and our commitment to our customers’ missions. Despite the added challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the team managed to coordinate an exceptional proposal, to prepare for oral presentations, and to design and build a winning prototype – and at rapid speed.

GDIT is proud of the team’s work and their hustle – never sacrificing excellence for speed. Flawless execution is always the goal, no matter the circumstances. And this team really delivered. We can’t wait to continue to deliver for DISA and this critical DoD priority.