An inter-agency working group has extended the deadline for vendors to submit ideas for implementing a third-party, cloud-based identity management system on federal websites.

Contractors must now provide input to the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) Tiger Team by Aug. 20, a week later than originally planned.

“In this case, we really don’t know what the landscape is as far as the products, and what’s available,” said the General Services Administration’s Deb Gallagher, a team co-chair, in an interview with Federal News Radio. “I think it’s very important to have our industry partners involved, because they do have good solutions, and they have good ideas of how to approach some of these areas of concern.”

The White House-sponsored team has been working on the concept of managing identities in the cloud for months. The goal is for agency websites to accept externally-issued credentials that meet Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management (FICAM) standards.

“What we’re trying to do is accept those [credentials], so that citizens can come into the federal government and access the resources that they need access to,” Gallagher said.

The team is creating common requirements that all agencies could agree to around federated identity management in the cloud.

“This opportunity is for us to provide a service so all federal agencies can accept these credentials without having to go through a lot of integration at the agency level,” said Gallagher, who is also director of identity assurance and trusted access at GSA.

Interested vendors should submit input on 13 topics, including descriptions of products and practices to preserve privacy.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that the citizen understands that we’re not promulgating the information across all of the … resources that they might be looking at,” Gallagher said.

The FCCX Tiger Team has posted a blog entry with instructions for submitting input.

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