Constant cyber attacks on both commercial groups and governments have raised awareness of the importance of cyber security. State and local governments are determined to keep their networks secure but it is questionable whether they believe the government compliance mandate will help them with this task. Local governments face critical cyber security challenges and the government compliance mandate may be getting in the way.
Complying with an Increasing Amount of Regulations is Difficult
In addition to the government compliance mandate, federal and state government agencies have introduced numerous other new regulations involving cyber security. Local governments that fail to comply with these regulations are often penalized by becoming ineligible for federal funding or by triggering audits. As a result, state and local governments will often ignore other security practices in order to prioritize regulation compliance.
There is an Overwhelming Amount of Cyber Threats
There is a rapidly increasing amount of complex cyber threats to governments every day. Both untargeted and targeted threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and risk devastating results. Untargeted threats put data that is not backed up in danger of being lost forever while targeted attacks are much more difficult to block and can be extremely destructive.
As cyber attacks are becoming more successful, it is understandable that local governments will be critical of the government compliance mandate’s effectiveness.
The Continued Inability to View and Control Cyber Security
Since there is a lack of cyber security visibility, local governments must rely on automatic security alerts. However, as the number of cyber attacks increase, there are entire departments that must be created in order to solely sift through piles of security events and alerts. Of course, tackling this task is nearly impossible and if this is the only method local governments use to manage security, it likely will not end well.