BAE Systems debuts new SIBA tool for secure info sharing in Intelligence Community

BAE Systems announced on March 21 the launch of SIBA, a tool that redefines and simplifies secure data collaboration and dissemination for both government and commercial customers.

SIBA provides an innovative solution to secure information sharing for the nation’s Intelligence Community, as well as banks, law firms, and users of electronic medical records. The SIBA solution works seamlessly with Microsoft Office and SharePoint, without modifying those applications. The tool was unveiled before joint customers at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA.

“The government has long weighed ’need-to-know’ against ’need-to-protect,’ and SIBA enables agencies to quickly and securely share actionable and relevant intelligence without compromising security.”

It is imperative that agencies in the Intelligence Community are able to quickly migrate intelligence data to shared repositories, where it can be accessed securely in real-time by multiple users in multiple agencies. SIBA provides this capability to any government agency or business by leveraging their existing Microsoft Office and SharePoint investments. Unlike competitor solutions, no additional investment is required for the development of new secure inter-agency clouds or other big data platforms to ingest, tag, replicate, and share information.

“SIBA delivers a secure information sharing capability that is unprecedented and of critical importance for law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” said DeEtte Gray, president of BAE Systems’ Intelligence & Security sector. “SIBA is helping to get critical intelligence into the hands of those who need it most by seamlessly integrating with the information sharing environment in place today. Our customers need to collapse infrastructure and take out costs, not build new large complex programs. SIBA will help them achieve that goal.”

SIBA enables analysts to tag (portion mark) specific characters, words, paragraphs and images within their documents to define need-to-know access to portions of data. This allows other users, like field personnel and coalition partners, to access redacted versions of the intelligence product, based on network access and security clearance. Additionally, the solution enables, by policy, further data redaction if information is being accessed by less-trusted mobile devices, or if access is from a less-trusted network.

“A majority of the reports that provide actionable intelligence relevant to field personnel are never received due to classification challenges,” said Peder Jungck, chief technology officer of BAE Systems’ Intelligence & Security sector. “The government has long weighed ‘need-to-know’ against ‘need-to-protect,’ and SIBA enables agencies to quickly and securely share actionable and relevant intelligence without compromising security.”

Underpinning the security of SIBA is STOP 7, the same low-level security architecture utilized by BAE Systems’ XTS Guard, which was recently selected by DoD as its critical cloud-based enterprise security choice for cross-network data transfer.