Red Hat’s David Egts Recommends Risk Mgmt Strategies for State & Local Gov’t Cybersecurity

David Egts, chief technologist of Red Hat‘s North American public sector business, has offered three recommendations for state and local government agencies to strengthen cybersecurity posture amid the increasing risk of ransomware attacks.

Egts wrote in a GCN guest piece published Monday that agencies should keep inventory of applications to ensure that all are given protection. He noted that library repositories and commercial container registries can provide agency security teams with validated and actively-developed software for use in a toolset.

“This balances security governance with developer productivity by giving developers a vetted toolset they can use to create innovative applications.”

Building on his first advice, Egts said information technology managers should be aware of all the available software features and services because some built-in tools can automatically set standards to filter which applications can be run on the network. He emphasized the possibility that some existing software already offers the needed agency network protection.

Automating security is the last part of Egts’ three-pronged strategy. According to him, automation can help agencies minimize risks caused by human errors, as well as enable them to prioritize more pressing or strategic initiatives.

He urged agencies to launch cybersecurity efforts now considering the volume of data from customers and citizens that tempt financially driven hackers.