The state of New York and many of its cities are aggressively pursuing a strategic overhaul of the delivery of services to residents. For instance, the state’s 2022-23 IT strategic plan emphasizes improving IT resiliency in part by getting away from legacy systems, implementing an enterprise architecture, and improving demand management and service delivery, to name a few. The state recently unveiled its new statewide cybersecurity strat...

With a growing number of dams approaching their design service life, dam safety engineers are looking for ways to mitigate the risks related to public safety, aging infrastructure and rising maintenance costs. Modernizing dam monitoring and maintenance practices with digital advancements, including the latest automated condition monitoring solutions, drone-captured reality modeling and digital twins, are giving public sector dam operators tool...

It is hard to think of a technology that has taken over the IT ecosystem faster than artificial intelligence. OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, and yet it already has evolved so much that it bears little resemblance to v .0. The federal government has been moving quickly by its standards to address AI’s challenges and capabilities, including a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, an AI Risk Management Framework from the National I...

State and local governments had to adapt quickly to the effects of the pandemic, as workers and residents alike were encouraged to shelter in their homes. This created major challenges for agencies’ IT systems and technical support staff. Rather than using a “hub-and-spoke” method of connecting employees to servers, data, applications, and each other – where cybersecurity focused on firewalls around the perimeter ...

Cybersecurity has always contended with evolving threats. As the internet has become more embedded into social and economic life and smart phones, tablets and other handheld devices become ubiquitous, bad actors have devised new attacks to capitalize on new vulnerabilities. And just as agencies are implementing zero trust architecture to help with this wave, other IT developments are threatening to upend cybersecurity even more. For instance,...

Cybersecurity has always contended with evolving threats. As the internet has become more embedded into social and economic life and smart phones, tablets and other handheld devices become ubiquitous, bad actors have devised new attacks to capitalize on new vulnerabilities. And just as agencies are implementing zero trust architecture to help with this wave, other IT developments are threatening to upend cybersecurity even more. For instance,...

State and local governments and education produce large amounts of unstructured data in a wide range of data types. From student report cards that contain personally identifiable information (PII) to municipal tax rolls full of information that fraudsters want to steal, these organizations have a data protection challenge on their hands. Keeping these diverse data sets safe and ensuring their high availability are essential for smooth educatio...

Ransomware, malware, phishing, DDoS, social engineering, zero-day exploit, botnets – the list of types of attacks out there is long enough to keep even the most seasoned cybersecurity expert awake at night. And with the increased use of remote computing, the cyber attack surface grows as more edge devices are added to networks. Creating a zero trust environment holds a lot of promise to provide significantly improved cybersecurity. In th...

Events on the world stage are also playing out in cyberspace. Nation-states continue their kinetic wars into internet realms, commit crimes such as financial and intellectual property theft, and pursue their global strategic goals hidden from view. Ransomware attacks are increasing again. It’s a tough time for cybersecurity professionals. “We’re seeing attackers cause bigger impacts with less skills. They’re also more b...

Many government agencies wrestle with their legacy systems and outdated processes every day, especially when it comes to cybersecurity and data flow. Agencies usually have multiple servers, private or hybrid clouds, and thousands of end points, from desktop computers to smart phones, tablets to sensors, generating millions of bits of data. An army of data analysts wouldn’t be able to keep up with the volume of logs being generated (and n...