Stroud District Council is focused on protecting its information assets to ensure that they are held securely and made available whenever needed. A recent government initiative called Government Connect mandated a series of security controls to ensure that all local authorities have a similar focus and approach.
Government Connect is an accredited and secure network between central government and every local authority in England and Wales. The network is known as GCSx (Government Connect Secure Extranet). GCSx is part of the wider Government Secure Intranet (GSi) and provides connectivity to nearly all central departments (Scottish local authorities have already established a similar network known as the Government Secure Extranet - GSx).
Government Connect requires all local authorities to scan all incoming emails to block executable content, HTML (webpage) emails, password protected documents and encrypted files.
These are worthwhile security controls but implementing them creates an interesting challenge since local authorities work with a variety of people and organisations, who in turn use different software. We have therefore taken the approach that we will permit all documents for which we own the software to open, providing we can security scan and verify them.
The following document attachments are permitted.
| Image/Drawing: | *.bmp *.gif *.jpg *.png *.tif *.tiff *.wmf *.dwg *.vsd *.eps |
| Text: | *.csv *.rtf *.dat *.txt *.xml *.sql |
| Compressed: | *.zip |
| Office: | *.doc *.docm *.docx *.dot *.dotm *.dotx *.mdb *.mdi *.potx *.ppam *.pps *.ppsm *.ppsx *.ppt *.pptm *.pptx *.prj *.pub *.wps *.xlam *.xls *.xlsb *.xlsm *.xlsx *.xltx |
| Other: | *.pdf *.eml *.msg *.rep *.stc *.std *.sti *.stw *.sxm *.wav |
