Attachmate Emulators Achieve FDCC Compliance

February 19, 2008 Alex Woodie

The Reflection and EXTRA! collection of emulators from Attachmate has achieved compliance with the Office of Management and Budget’s Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), a new standard that government agencies must adopt to ensure their Windows XP and Windows Vista desktops are configured securely.

The FDCC, in case you’re not aware, is a guideline created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that defines more than 700 specific settings in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Internet Explorer 7.0 that governmental agencies must use to properly secure their desktops. The initial deadline for FDCC compliance was February 1, but many agencies have not had time to properly implement and verify compliance yet.

While it comes after the OMB’s February 1 deadline for FDCC compliance, Attachmate’s completion of FDCC validation can still help government agencies under the gun to prove they’re adopting the fFederal gGovernment’s latest security mandate.

FDCC tests of Reflection and EXTRA! proved several points, Attachmate says, including: emulators can run without elevated system administration privileges (a big issue in Vista); that the standard installation, operation, maintenance, updating and/or patching behaviors of the products do not alter the approved FDCC configuration; and that the products are fully functional when run in an FDCC environment.

As the second largest provider of terminal emulation solutions to System i shops (behind IBM), these findings are good news for Attachmate’s government customers. The government counts the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, Military Health Systems, the U.S. Postal Service, and other federal agencies as clients (although not all of them are System i customers).

“Attachmate has a long history of working in partnership with federal customers to secure data-in-motion and to meet Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements,” says Tom Gdowik, director of federal sales at Attachmate. “We are committed to providing solutions that secure federal customers’ critical data.”

The Attachmate products that have achieved compliance include: