As with many larger corporations and public organisations, the city’s infrastructure and technical complexity is in danger of becoming overwhelming, preventing efficient introduction of new technology, services and solutions. The complexity threatens security, increases the cost of managing the architecture and some organisations may not even have the skills to manage their own network and equipment.
To lower the bar for innovation, the City of Kristiansund has built a zero trust network in all public buildings such as schools, nursing homes and offices. This network is fundamental for making the municipality’s services more user-friendly, efficient and cost-effective, and for enabling innovation.
Briefly, a zero trust network is a network without any security enabled, open for everyone. As all city services depend on a cloud-based open infrastructure, instead of securing thousands of computers, the City of Kristiansund secures the centralised applications used to deliver services. The only tool that the authenticated users need, to have access to all the city’s services and applications, is a browser. The idea is to reuse the multifactor authentication also used by Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc. The innovation lies in blending these methods with the national authentication component (ID-porten).