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GCN Home > 02/18/08 issue

The struggle to conform

Retrofitting PCs with a standard configuration poses unique challenges

By Joab Jackson and Jason Miller

All roads in the federal government may lead to a standard configuration for Windows PCs, but those roads cross different terrains. Some agencies have made significant progress complying with the Federal Desktop Core Configuration, but others are experiencing considerable challenges, if the presentations and discussions at a recent FDCC workshop are any indication.

The Army and Interior Department are among those on track to implement FDCC across their organizations. But some other agencies have unique functions and workforce arrangements that pose a challenge to retrofitting desktops to FDCC, agency officials and industry experts say.

Moreover, adoption of FDCC could be slow for some agencies because ensuring that each agency PC complies with Office of Management and Budget mandates will require 16 checks that must be done by hand, adding complexity to the process.

Last year, OMB ordered agencies to upgrade their PCs. Those PCs running Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista must conform to FDCC. Authored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Security Agency with the help of Microsoft, FDCC is a set of operating system configurations designed to improve security. The configuration would, for example, turn off unused services and run users’ applications in user, rather than administrator, mode.

By Feb. 1, agencies were to give OMB a summary of the total number of desktop PCs they have running Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista, along with the total of those that are FDCC-compliant.

By March 31, agencies must submit a technical report to NIST and OMB about the status of their implementations.

The move to a standard configuration will change the way some employees work. At the workshop NIST hosted last month, Blair Heiserman, who works in the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, noted that some NIST employees, being technically inclined, write their own device drivers. Unsigned drivers are not permitted under FDCC, though Vista allows administrators to sign drivers.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IT Security, Enterprise Architecture, IT Management



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