Editor’s Note– File under: Dedicated, Underappreciated Government Bureaucrats
From: GCN/Cybereye
Most government IT professionals − by a wide margin − would rather be trapped in an elevator for 24 hours than have their networks hacked, according to a recent survey.
This could explain why cybersecurity is listed as the top area for expanded IT spending in the coming year, with 59 percent saying they expect increased security spending, topping cloud computing by 14 percentage points.
The results from a survey of 400 federal, state and local government officials conducted for Cisco underscore the foundational importance of cybersecurity. Being stuck in an elevator would ruin your day. A breach of your network or data could ruin your career − and 71 percent said they’d rather be stuck in the elevator. If your security does not work, nothing else really matters.
Feds tend to be more conscious of this than those in state and local government. Improving security is the second place technology goal in the overall survey at 22 percent, behind reducing costs (28 percent), but security is tops in the federal sector. Budget constraints are the top threat to IT infrastructure, at 35 percent overall, and cyberattacks come in second, at 17 percent, but attacks are seen as a bigger threat in the federal sector than among state and local organizations. This does not necessarily mean that federal networks are more vulnerable than those in state and local systems, but the U.S. government is a high-profile target for hacktivists, criminals looking for valuable intellectual property and other nations engaged in espionage.
Cybersecurity professionals are in an almost no-win situation.
Leave a Reply