Mary-Louise Hoffman
John Zarour, director of state and local government and K-12 at Splunk, wrote in a piece published Wednesday on GCN that agencies should re-evaluate their approach to cybersecurity and invest in modern tools to avoid a breach.
Zarour said he believes state and local agencies can also be targets of an attack like the U.S. Office of Personnel Management hack because they also handle sensitive personal information.
He urged public sector organizations to adopt analytics platforms that work to correlate and visualize data from machine logs, networks, applications, sensors and cloud computing environments.
“Comprehensive analytics capabilities are important to the security and modernization of state and local government,” Zarour stated.
He added that platforms that employ machine-learning and data-based behavioral analytics can also provide better protection against intrusions compared with traditional incident management tools.
Analytics technology also has the potential to help users share information learned during the threat detection and mitigation process, Zarour wrote.
