AUSkey

Usable business to government authentication

Castelain are the only company who can offer the team who designed the standard business reporting authentication credential called AUSkey.

AUSkey is the result of a successful partnership between business, and federal and state governments, to design and build a single credential that could be used to authenticate all business to government financial reporting. Launched in mid 2010, it is an invisible PKI credential that has already been rolled out to over 300,000 Australian business users (and growing), who use it to submit forms to government or to log in to participating agencies’ web sites. It is now being adopted across all of federal government as part of the "lead agency" program.

Castelain's Chief Architect and Lead Business Analyst led the design team for the AUSkey project. Working closely with the ATO, business accounting software developers, and all of the other state and federal government agencies involved, we collated and meticulously documented the requirements.

We were challenged to achieve something that was:

  • easy to use
  • portable 
  • simple to obtain and renew
  • understandable, and yet still
  • able to provide an appropriate level of security 

We took the design through a number of iterations, drilling down into the detail of use cases, business rules, architecture and component specifications. We provided working prototypes to use as inputs into User-Centred Design workshops, where we helped take the design-in-progress back to business and agency stakeholders. We took the results of these workshops and used them to refine the requirements and design further, over several iterations.

Working closely with Verizon Business, Castelain then provided several of the development teams that together developed and deployed the AUSkey components.

 Want to learn about AUSkey?

Castelain can help agencies integrate AUSkey into their existing systems. We are the company that understands AUSkey intricately, and are best placed to help agencies understand what AUSkey is, and how to assess whether AUSkey is a good fit for requirements.

AUSkey in the press

Read more about the government's plans for AUSkey.