News article written by Corbett Communications. The statements made or opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Engineers Australia
Like many government departments, The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has decided to outsource some of its work. Except the ASD is an intelligence agency headquartered in Canberra under the remit of the Australian Government Department of Defence. It is looking for “offensive and defensive specialists” to deal with classified information where you can get a “licence to hack” and go covert. Sounds like it’s straight out of ABC TV’s cyber thriller series The Code but it’s not, it’s for real, and it could be your future job if you make the grade.
The ASD collects and analyses foreign signals intelligence, known as Sigint, and supports military and strategic decision-making. The agency also provides advice and assistance to state and federal authorities in relation to security and integrity of information and co-ordinates and assists with operation responses to cyber incidents of national importance across government and systems of national importance. This is known as InfoSec.
ASD’s motto spells out what the agency does: ‘Reveal their secrets - Protect our own' and in its own words the motto, “accurately summarises our two roles. One is collecting foreign intelligence by interception. The other is information and cyber security – stopping others from doing the same to us”.
Earlier this year, the Department of Defence put out to tender for “the provision of business management, technical ICT and related skill sets to the Defence Intelligence Agencies (‘DIAs’), in relation to the development and support of capability used by the DIAs in the conduct of their core functions”. It said the Commonwealth had decided to establish a Technical Support Services Panel (TSS Panel) of service providers to provide services to DIAs as required. The panel would be required to source a range of technical ICT, business management and related skill sets to be used to support ICT operations and capability development by the ASD, with a timeframe by December 2016.
The Tender documents revealed the ASD is planning to expand its three discrete ‘protected’ level IT environments to 15 'protected' and 'unclassified' zones over the next three years, according to IT News. This would see an increase in its physical servers from 20 to 150, user endpoints expand from 100 to 600, virtual machines grow from 100 to 1000, and storage requirements increase from 200TB to 10PB. System developers will work on everything from architecture to system design, testing and implementation. They may also be tasked with providing infrastructure solutions which could include hybrid cloud environments.
Author: Desi Corbett