The Telework Rush Tested States’ Cybersecurity, IT Maturity

June 2, 2020

StateScoop

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced state government employees to start working from home earlier this year, no one was fully prepared. Most employees hadn’t been acclimated to the isolation they would soon experience, states didn’t have enough equipment or software licenses to go around and cybersecurity officials didn’t have enough time to ensure operations could continue under the same conservative privacy and data-security standards.

The enterprises that states have spent decades building and protecting were replaced nearly overnight by a network of “less sophisticated” home offices. Curtis Dukes, a vice president with CIS, said the timing is unfortunate given the near doubling of data breaches tallied by Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report.