Stats bureau to bolster web services security

The Australian Bureau of Statistics plans to spend at least $450,000 on web application firewall technology for its internet gateway as it continues to roll out web services.

In a tender released to market overnight, the agency  said it had "sophisticated firewall technology deployed in front of the web applications.

"However, the ABS wishes to expand its capabilities in Web Application Firewall technology which will provide application level awareness in order to deliver required Web security," it said.

"The ABS has an ongoing program of deploying web services and other Service Orientated Architectures (SOA) into the ABS gateway.

"While providing advanced business functionality, SOAs introduce extra security considerations that need to be addressed."

ABS estimated that by the 2011 Census its web services would generate 2,000,000 requests per day and 14Gb data transfer per day."

The agency went to tender for the supply, maintenance and support of the firewall technology.

It said it could purchase units for all three gateway environments - development, test and production.