Government IT Execs Call for Standardized Vista Rollouts

Computerworld - The White House sees Windows Vista as an opportunity to move all of the federal government’s PCs to a standard security configuration. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the IT director for California’s Monterey County views Vista upgrades by individual users as a potential danger to his systems.

Despite differences in tone, recent memos from IT officials in Washington and Monterey delivered fundamentally similar messages: Vista rollouts will take a lot of planning and coordination.

Karen Evans, who sets federal IT policy as administrator of e-government and IT at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said last week that deploying a new operating system opens the door to improved security management on PCs. For instance, adopting standard security settings for Vista will allow automated patching of systems to “the maximum extent possible,” she said.

Weeding the Garden

“If we don’t take and seize upon this opportunity to standardize, a thousand flowers will bloom, and we’ll be back to where we were,” said Evans, meaning that federal agencies will be left to manage a variety of PC security configurations.

In a memo sent to agency IT heads last month, Evans said standardized configurations are needed to improve the overall security and reliability of the government’s PCs. Clay Johnson, the OMB’s deputy director for management, wrote in a separate memo that it is critical for agencies “to ensure [that] a very small number of secure configurations are allowed to be used.”

Agencies have until next February to adopt common security settings developed jointly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), several other agencies and Microsoft Corp. The directive applies to both Vista and Windows XP, and it requires software vendors to ensure that their products can work well with the new standard configurations.

But that doesn’t mean the White House is looking to stop Vista deployments. Evans indicated that, to the contrary, the OMB is giving agencies a green light to upgrade to the new operating system.

“I think it’s a big catalyst,” said Jeff Parker, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. Parker added that the secure configuration mandate should be particularly good news for Microsoft and other vendors, which can tell agencies, “Maybe you can figure out how to do it yourself, but we can get it done now.”

Virgil Schwab, Monterey County’s IT director, said uncoordinated installations of Vista present “a real danger of business interruption unless compatibility with other applications is assured.”

Many of the county’s 4,000 PCs an