Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat and former Air Force Deputy CIO Bill Marion offer their views on cybersecurity.
The federal government is evolving its approach to cybersecurity by shifting to a zero-trust model, but in the meantime, agency IT leaders still need to ensure that their defenses are robust and that they can respond to incidents effectively.
Doing so requires a mix of cybersecurity tools and approaches. FedTech recently conducted a poll on Twitter asking government IT professionals about the elements of cybersecurity incident response that are most important for their agencies.
The most popular response was disaster recovery tools (36.2 percent), followed by security information and event management (SIEM) tools (23.4 percent), purple teaming (21.3 percent), and network segmentation (19.1 percent).
FedTech asked several members of its 30 Federal IT Influencers Worth a Follow list to weigh in with their thoughts on the poll responses. Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat says it was “interesting” that disaster recovery polled so highly, since agencies are required to have DR plans in place per the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014.
Read full story at FedTech…
first published week of: 11/08/2021
Smart city leaders say technology must be deployed with outcomes and equity in mind
Smart mobility is one of the main use cases that smart cities have been exploring in recent years, as they seek to use technology to help residents get around quickly, efficiently and safely.
This has led tech companies to bring new solutions and products to cities — everything from autonomous vehicles to curbside management solutions and intelligent sensors that help manage traffic flows.
However, city leaders involved in smart mobility projects say the best path forward for partnerships between technology firms and cities is for the companies to focus on how their solutions can improve citizens’ lives and meet residents’ needs.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 10/25/2021
States should start to make strides on shifting to a zero-trust architecture for cybersecurity.
Government actions, including the American Rescue Plan Act, have led to a deluge of federal funds to states over the past few months. Additionally, the federal government is using a $1 billion allocation for technology modernization and cybersecurity. These funds are vitally needed, and many anticipate that more funding is on the horizon.
While strengthening cybersecurity and data protection is a top priority at both the federal and state levels, state and local governments often face tighter budgets and more limited staffing, particularly around IT and cybersecurity.
Most states spend less than 3 percent of their total IT budgets on cybersecurity, according to Deloitte. The result is that state agencies are often left vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 11/01/2021
SAP National Security Services CEO Mark Testoni joins the podcast to discuss how agencies can more effectively use contracting to secure critical infrastructure.
The United States government spends hundreds billions of dollars on contracting, with billions of dollars spent on information security and technology contracts. As cybersecurity comes back to the forefront of the national conversation and with a pandemic that’s forced maximum telework, the federal government‘s reliance on secure tech contracting will be key for the Biden administration.
Source GovExec…
first published week of: 03/08/2021
Investing in cloud-based infrastructure and tools for hybrid work will allow agencies to get ahead.
State and local governments started to breathe a little easier in March when President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law. The law includes $350 billion in total funding for state, local and tribal governments, which have been battered by revenue losses during the coronavirus pandemic.
As the National Association of Counties notes, governments can use the funding for a variety of purposes, including responding to or mitigating the pandemic or its negative economic impacts; providing government services to the extent of the locality’s reduction in revenue; and making necessary investments in water, sewer, or broadband infrastructure.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 05/24/2021
EOCs are hubs of connectivity public safety agencies can set up to respond to disasters.
States, counties and cities are always on guard for large-scale emergencies. When those arrive or seem imminent, they often activate emergency operations centers. This can be done to coordinate responses for everything from civil unrest to snowstorms or flash flooding.
Similar in many respects to real-time crime centers or fusion centers, emergency operations centers gather data from numerous sources in a central location to help state and local public safety agencies coordinate responses. For EOCs, the response is usually related to a natural disaster or large-scale emergency.
Emergency operations centers’ role is to serve as “a physical or virtual location from which coordination and support of incident management activities is directed,” notes Ready.gov, a federal website.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 02/08/2021
Even though government buildings may be seeing less foot traffic as more citizen services migrate online, state and local agencies still need to ensure that the areas around official government buildings and offices are as secure as possible.
As government IT and physical security leaders consider what kinds of solutions they should use to ensure appropriate levels of security for their buildings and in smart cities, they can draw on an increasingly sophisticated toolset to do so.
Everywhere government agencies have facilities or own properties, they have a responsibility to protect the people who use them, the premises and the assets inside. As they go about that mission, three trends are coming together in the realm of physical security.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 01/25/2021
As agencies continue to support telework they need to ensure that their conferencing tools are as secure as possible.
In spring 2020, organizations across government and private industry scrambled to figure out how to keep themselves secure as office buildings emptied and workers established home offices with little to no warning.
Among the top concerns, says Branko Bokan, cybersecurity expert at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, were the growing use of file sharing as well as the use of personal equipment, including devices, networks, and communication and collaboration software. Another key concern was physical security, such as sensitive materials that could be seen on desks during teleconferencing sessions or smart home devices that might be listening to discussions regarding private or classified data.
Read full story at FedTech…
first published week of: 07/19/2021
In the last lesson of the smart city Master’s degree program at the University of Hong Kong in early March, students formed groups and presented different smart cities around the world that Hong Kong
In the last lesson of the smart city Master’s degree program at the University of Hong Kong in early March, students formed groups and presented different smart cities around the world that Hong Kong could learn from. One group pointed out that the air pollution due to traffic congestion in Kwun Tong was serious, they suggested that the government should follow the example of London to designate low emission zone and reduce vehicle entry, violators would be severely punished (the penalty charge in London is upto £100) to improve the air quality of the zone.
However, this is easier said than done. A survey found that when the traffic is low, a bus ride from Kwun Tong ferry pier to the apm shopping mall takes only 9 minutes, while a walk is about 14 minutes, but the bus ride could take 77 minutes during peak hours at 5 pm! Kwun Tong, an old district with a combination of residential (population of about 700,000), industrial and commercial (a cross-district working population of 200,000) areas, has many narrow roads. The rapid development of surrounding new districts, coupled with serious illegal parking have combined to overload the roads.
In fact, many old cities have similar problems. Tokyo, well-known for its congestion, has adopted underground intelligent parking facilities with multi-level design for many years. The facility is equipped with fast elevators and rotating mobile platforms to park cars at different levels, intelligent automatic systems help users find and access their parked vehicles. It has doubled the parking space compared with traditional parking lots.
Read full story at ejinsight…
first published week of: 06/21/2021
The new law makes it easier for state and local agencies to migrate to secure and trusted .gov domains.
Many state and local governments still operate official websites with .us, .com or .org domains, but that may soon start to shift as they move to more secure and trusted .gov domains.
That’s thanks to the DOTGOV Online Trust in Government Act, a piece of legislation tucked into an omnibus spending and coronavirus pandemic relief bill Congress passed in December.
The law provides support services, security enhancements and outreach from the federal government to state and local agencies to get them to shift their domains to .gov. The law would reduce or wipe away the costs of making the shift, which security experts agree is an essential element of improving internet security for government agencies.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 02/15/2021