Jon Ramsey, chief technology officer of Secureworks (Nasdaq: SCWX), said information technology modernization initiatives provide government agencies an opportunity to take advantage of innovative ways to address cyber threats and one of those is network microsegmentation, which could help them reduce the attack surface.
Network microsegmentation “can go a long way toward preventing the ransomware attacks that have targeted state and local governments in particular,” Ramsey wrote.
He called on agencies to “think about security in terms of measured risk and making the most of their resources” as they advance their IT modernization efforts.
Ramsey said agencies should carry out preemptive actions to ensure the security of data, such as identifying potential data that could be targeted by threat actors, adopting modern platform based on software-defined data centers, training employees to steer clear of social engineering techniques and “encrypting data when it’s in transit, in storage and being processed in memory.”
He discussed the importance of technology, people and process in ensuring the security of IT systems and how a modern IT platform could help agencies respond to future and current challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic.
“With a modern IT infrastructure, the government can boost its ability to correlate data and gain critical insights into understanding who is at higher risk of contracting the disease, the most likely means of pathogen transmission, the best containment and mitigation practices, and the most effective way to do contact tracing, for example,” Ramsey added.
