NIEM

NIEM Using Templating & Web Services 

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) was launched in 2005 for the purpose of Developing, Disseminating, and Supporting information sharing standards and processes across all branches of government including:

• • Justice 

  • Public Safety 

  • Emergency and Disaster Management 

  • Intelligence

  • Homeland Security

  • Energy management ( Smart Grid )

Through NIEM, government agency data silos can be bridged to facilitate the sharing of information between them.

NIEM provides a common language, a universal XML based vocabulary and a framework by which State, Local, Tribal, and Federal Government Agencies may share data in both emergency and day-to-day operations. However in practice NIEM data must be wrapped in a messaging protocol like SOAP or XMPP for exchange across the wide-area / Internet. Proper exchange therefore requires an ability to onboard / offboard NIEM encoded data into a communications format suitable for the Internet and then provide the framework to control how that communication is routed, secured and validated to prevent either transmission error or data compromise.

Problem: NIEM Implementation is Complex

There are significant challenges around decoration of NIEM data messages into protocols and secondly in managing their exchange end-to-end so as to preserve the fidelity of the data and meet any inter-agency compliance requirements. Without specialized technology to encode and process NIEM data across an exchange, agencies looking to pass NIEM data will need to establish bi-lateral agreements on protocols and policies to exchange data so that the data consumer can understand the data provider.

This does not factor in the need to put in place security frameworks to ensure that the data is not tampered in flight and is only accessed by entitled users. This process is clearly complex and costly in the case of one information provider and one information consumer but grows geometrically more complex and costly as the number of bi-lateral relations increase. Worse, because the encoding and security measures must be coded into the applications, change management and testing become prohibitive.

Secure Smart Grid Integration

The Opportunity: Maximizing Efficiency & Reliability with Smart Meters

Use of wireless-enabled, networked “smart devices” is growing quickly across industry sectors. Themachine-to-machine (M2M) communications these devices enable are empowering enterprises to maximize the efficiency of their business operations and react more effectively to emerging challenges.

The emergence of M2M networking has been particularly significant in the energy and utilities sector, where the use of digital smart meters is becoming all-but ubiquitous. For power grid operators, this shift to a smart grid paradigm creates the promise of greatly increased efficiency, reliability and visibility.

The Problem: Secure Integration & Compliance Challenges

Any enterprise adopting the smart grid paradigm will face a range of serious integration, data transformation, security and compliance challenges. Specifically, data will need to be:

Routed at high speed across disparate information and application silos

Transformed from proprietary M2M protocols to formats used by on-premise systems

Secured against unauthorized access via strong, granular entitlement controls

Enriched or redacted to meet governance rules

The Layer 7 Solution: SecureSpan SOA Gateways

All of these challenges can be addressed by implementing Layer 7 Technologies’ award-winning SecureSpan SOA Gateway technology. SecureSpan’s policy-based SOA governance technology represents the ideal solution for efficiently routing, translating and securing high volumes of smart meter data.

The SecureSpan SOA Gateway provides everything utilities organizations need in order to:

Ease integration through translation of network protocols and data formats

Protect connectivity through access control, encryption and digital signatures

Optimize traffic flow with high-throughput, high-concurrency message processing

The SecureSpan SOA Gateway can be deployed in the DMZ or inside the enterprise, as a physical appliance or a virtual machine, on-premise or in the Cloud. This flexibility means that SecureSpan can support all Gateway needs and maximize smart grid benefits for companies across the energy and utilities sector.

• Learn more about Layer 7 solutions for smart grid

• Learn more about the SecureSpan SOA Gateway

Use Case: Gating Smart Meter Data