Technology Services -> Infrastructure -> TSA

The Transportation Security Administration formed immediately following the tragedies of Sept. 11. TSA is a component of the Department of Homeland Security and is responsible for security of the nation's transportation systems. With state, local and regional partners, TSA oversees security for the highways, railroads, buses, mass transit systems, ports and the 450 U.S. airports. TSA employs approximately 50,000 people from Alaska to Puerto Rico to ensure travels – by plane, train, automobile or ferry – are safe and secure.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) launched an initiative following the attacks of 9/11 to improve its overall Information Technology (IT) security posture by upgrading its existing infrastructure with newer technologies and improving its operational processes and procedures. As a result, an RFP was issued in 2001 seeking the services of a large federal IT integrator to provide a comprehensive, multi-year plan to achieve these goals.

Core services required to accomplish the goals of the administration included:

• A detail assessment and documentation of the existing IT infrastructure from an architecture and procedural perspective
• A GAP analysis of the required security posture versus what the current environment can deliver
• A redesign of the existing environment, utilizing new technologies and modern principles such as ITIL, Six Sigma and CMMI to ensure all issues in the GAP analysis reports are resolved
• Implement new designs in technology and procedures to stringent Release-engineering methodologies are tested in a lab simulating the production environment
• Perform pilot implementations in strategic locations
• Perform an enterprise wide implementation
• Manage the new environment while meeting the business demands of TSA

Summit Technologies Inc. is providing resources as a sub-contractor to the prime, Unisys Corporation, in order to deliver the services requested and meet the goals outlined by the administration of TSA. This program ensures TSA IT infrastructure meets the security and operational demands of a modern environment facing threats from inside/outside while meeting the computing demands of its users.

Summit provides expertise to the following organizations to support the above mentioned objectives:

• Systems Engineering and Integration (SEI) – performs assessments, designs and implementations
• Technical Writing – documentation of systems and procedures
• Lab – Release engineering and testing
• Operations – systems maintenance, support and operations
• Network Operations Center (NOC) – monitor performance of the entire network to ensure efficiencies and up-time
• Security Operations Center (SOC) – monitor all aspects of security as it pertains to the enterprise network
• Software Engineering – develop and modify proprietary and custom off the shelf software (COTS) applications as necessary