Report: State and Local Government See Resilience Hurdles, Goals
Source: Gov Tech
Global tensions are prompting state and local governments to deepen focus on their abilities to prevent, withstand and recover from cyber incidents, and many are particularly concerned about risks to sensitive data, according to a new report.
Rising international tensions are driving state and local governments to take a harder look at their cyber resilience, according to a new survey. But improvement efforts face hurdles, with state and local respondents citing struggles around workforce, funding and ever-more complicated technology environments.
Another challenge? How organizations think about what resilience means. Eighty-two percent of state, local and federal respondents said their organizations consider resilience to be a matter of “basic compliance and risk management functions,” rather defining it more dynamically as their entities’ abilities to anticipate and prevent, respond to and recover from cyber disruptions.
These findings come from a September 2022 survey of 310 government IT decision-makers conducted by MeriTalk, a government IT-focused public-private partnership, and sponsored by Splunk, a data platform provider.
About 161 respondents were from state and local entities and 149 from federal. While survey takers weren’t asked to list the entities they worked for — which could reveal if some came from the same one — “it can be assumed they come from various government organizations,” a MeriTalk representative told Government Technology.