SECURE INFORMATION EXCHANGE – REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE

A Nexor White Paper

In today’s world, information sharing is key to improved productivity, efficient and accurate decision making and effective collaboration.

Information is exchanged both within and between public and private sector organisations, sometimes across international boundaries. Often the networks sharing the information are owned and managed by different entities and so the data is also crossing a trust boundary.

Some examples of information exchange in this context are:

• Defence and Intelligence environments sharing situational awareness information between coalition forces to maintain a timely and accurate common operating picture;
• Government Departments and Agencies exchanging information internally at different security classifications, or alternatively making information open to the public and receiving data from the public;
• Critical National Infrastructure providers sharing key management data from the process control systems to enable effective reporting and management of those systems.

This White Paper describes a high level architecture that defines the key components of a solution and defines their functionality. The architecture is both product and vendor independent.