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The Communications Security Establishment of Musty Digital Systems Ltd delivers information technology security (ITS) solutions to the Government of Nigeria and African countries. MDSS is involved in a wide variety of activities in support of the Government policy objective of ensuring the appropriate safeguarding of all sensitive information and assets of the Government, including electronic authorization and authentication.

MDSS, following the superb economic reform programs initiated by the Government of Nigeria, provides consulting services and support to federal departments and agencies. It participates in national and international standards development and works with leading international industry to develop and certify ITS products to meet international standard and Nigerian needs. To achieve this, it is developing operational and technical documentation to support the implementation of the government security policy, and undertakes initiatives to support new or evolving federal requirements.

The Blueprint for Renewing Government Services Using Information Technology should be the federal government's high level strategy for taking advantage of dramatic improvements in information technology (IT) to reduce operational costs and be more efficient in the delivery of government services. This strategy focuses strongly on standards, directives and guidelines. In addition, the Blueprint envisages the use of a government wide electronic information infrastructure to simplify service delivery, reduce duplication and improve the level and speed of service to clients, at a lower cost to taxpayers. This can be accomplished by developing standards where needed, and adopting those security standards which already exist. MDSS is focused on four goals in these areas:

Identifying common requirements,
Proposing common solutions,
Partnering to develop common solutions with industry, and
Marketing the common solutions throughout the government and externally.
These common solutions are standards based, which removes the need to build unique solutions, and allows a building block approach to be applied to government IT systems.

The ITS Standards and Initiatives team within MDSS promotes, coordinates and manages various ITS initiatives to enhance information security in both private and public sectors, which will enable industries to produce standards-based products that have world-wide acceptance. In addition, the MDSS team is a major contributor to the establishment of ICT standards and guidelines for the Government of Nigeria. This is achieved by participating in and in coordinating standards development work in both national and international levels, and finally, taking advantage of ITC standards and initiatives work taking place outside Nigeria, extensive liaison work is carried out with MDSS's collaborating agencies on ICT activities and capability with International Contributors.

The staff involved in MDSS's ITS Standards and Initiatives work are a committed group of IT professionals. Through their work, MDSS, with input from both the Government and private sector, will establish and contribute to the ITS standards, guidelines and initiatives envisioned by the Blueprint to satisfy the Nigerian Government's needs for the future.