It is only recently that security has become a key element in all government systems. However, in some areas of government, such as the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, security has been important for considerably longer. The key players in this space have been Trusted Solaris from Sun Microsystems and custom applications either built internally or developed by important systems integrators such as Northrop Grumman, EDS, SAIC and General Dynamics.

Certainly much of the security built by systems integrators was completed under specific custom specifications and probably wasn’t nor may ever be open for competitive challenge. The dominance of Trusted Solaris and the relatively minor penetration by other commercial off the shelf (COTS) vendors is the major point of this illustration.  The major COTS vendors in this space, beside Trusted Solaris, are Hewlett Packard and Microsoft. While each offers competitive products developed for government security, their strategies in this market vary widely. Hewlett Packard’s offerings are nearest to IBM’s in that they provide the complete hardware/software platform and also a hardware solution that can run other types, or multiple types of operating systems. By comparison, Trusted Solaris is optimized for the Sun Sparc platform while Microsoft provides software that can be run on hardware from many different vendors.