State Scoop
A biennial report published earlier this month by the Texas Department of Information Resources outlines significant changes for the state.

GovLoop
Cyber threats have become more frequent and creative, and government cybersecurity teams often struggle to keep up, but automation can help.

State Scoop
Last week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an update to its Infrastructure Resilience Planning Framework, a guidebook meant to help state, local, tribal and territorial governments safeguard their critical systems and facilities.

GovLoop
It is crucial to understand the link between government service and trust. "State and local agencies are modernizing their technology and transforming the way they serve their residents," says Dean Scontras, Vice President of State, Local and Education at Okta.

Government Technology
As cybersecurity threats change over time, so do the jobs of those tasked with fighting them, leading some states to look outside the IT agency for help.

Leveraging a strong partnership between Police, Fire, Dispatch, Transportation Engineering, IT and a local school district, the City of Frisco brought a vision for Situation Awareness for Emergency Response (SAFER) into being through the in-house development of a geospatial platform. Since its initial implementation in 2009, SAFER has grown into a critical business application that utilizes real time data from nearly 30 integrated systems. These include but are not limited to: 9-1-1 caller locations, RapidSOS, Vehicle and Motorola Radio GPS locations, Waze incidents and road closures, live-video feeds, Weather Conditions, Hazmat Plumes, building floor plans and the location of critical infrastructure.

SAFER Overview Video
Frisco Partnership with FISD Video

Submitted by:
Susan Benedicto Olson
Assistant Director
Department of Information Technology
City of Frisco

For those just starting to build a cybersecurity program the challenges seem daunting. There are several cybersecurity frameworks that you can choose from, and they all have their benefits to help you on your journey to building a successful program. Most frameworks start with the basics: inventory your assets, protect your data and endpoints, and get a hand on your user account security. Once those things are in place, then you get to focus on proactive security measures such as vulnerability management, security monitoring, and penetrations testing. These are all things that need to be addressed to secure your organization’s data, employees, and public reputation, but what happens if you have a major security event at the beginning of your journey? That’s where the interim incident response plan comes in.