State of the States 2026

The challenges and issues facing state agencies regarding IT investments and modernization are very similar to those federal agencies are dealing with, but often are compounded because state responsibilities (licensing, inspection, and citizen assistance, to name a few) are that much closer to the customers who need their services.

This three-day event tracks many of the priorities that state CIOs are paying attention to –cybersecurity, resilience, modernization, cloud computing, data management, using AI, and analytics, to name a few.

Learning Objectives:

• Establish a working definition of resilience for your organization
• Understand the complementary roles of cybersecurity and resilience in keeping agency systems operational in the event of a cyber attack
• Evaluate ways to use SIEM and SOAR to strengthen your SOC’s performance
• Outline how using modernization toolkits can speed the delivery of better services to citizens
• Identify the forms of hybrid cloud (such as public bolstered by private cloud) that best suit your agency’s requirements
• Understand the integration of SaaS platforms into your agency’s cloud choices
• Understand how to use data platforms to create governance policies that provide quality data
• Evaluate the use of analytics to drive budgeting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
• Delineate ways that GenAI tools can be used for better forecasting and making data-driven decisions