Cyber security and privacy are becoming a key focus for municipalities investing in digital transformation. Discover our best practices to protect your data.
Local governments across Canada are investing in digital transformation to streamline service delivery models and meet the changing needs of citizens, businesses, and employees. However, as digital adoption continues to rise, it is becoming increasingly more important to ensure your technology, data, and information is secure to protect your organization against threats.
We recently conducted the nationwide MNP Digital Municipal Research Report to benchmark digital transformation across municipalities. When looking at strategic priorities, cyber security and privacy were identified as a primary focus for municipal organizations over the next three to five years. Let’s review why cyber security is a key priority for local governments and the best practices you can follow to enhance the security of your organization.
Why are local governments concerned about cyber security?
Government organizations continue to be among the top targets of cyber attacks — and the consequences of a successful attack can be severe. Many local governments are emphasizing the improvement of the digital service delivery experience for their citizens, but must in parallel ensure that technology, data, and information is protected and secure.
While cyber budgets are often on the lower end of the scale, protecting data is still critical — and it is necessary for municipal organizations to explore how to do more with less resources to meet the expectations of their citizens. Understanding the risks and potential impacts of a successful cyber attack is the first step toward keeping your organization safe from threats:
Privacy breaches
Your employees play a key role in ensuring that your citizens receive the services they need to thrive. However, employees without proper training may not recognize cyber threats to your organization such as phishing emails or malware attacks. This lack of awareness may lead to data leaks and breaches of sensitive information — significantly impacting the privacy of your citizens.
Disruption to critical infrastructure and services
A successful attack has the potential to disrupt critical infrastructure such as your public transit system or water and waste systems. It may also interrupt emergency and other necessary services that your municipal organization provides to support the health and safety of your citizens.
Reputational impacts
Your citizens trust your local government to provide the infrastructure and services they need to support their wellbeing. They also expect that your municipal organization will protect their sensitive information.
A successful cyber attack will not only have a significant financial and operational impact on your municipal organization. It may also disrupt the critical infrastructure and emergency services that your citizens rely on and cause reputational damage to your organization. This may result in long-term consequences such as difficulty recruiting new talent or increased budget constraints.
What cyber security best practices can support local governments?
While many local governments have limited budgets to invest in digital transformation, it is still critical to protect sensitive data from cyber attacks and security breaches. Following these cyber security best practices can help protect your organization’s technology, data, and information from threats:
Review risks
Risks are an inherent part of digital transformation programs and initiatives. Review any potential privacy risks introduced by changes to your business processes and technologies to understand the threats associated with your digital transformation initiatives. This will help you identify the steps you can take to mitigate the risks associated with adopting new technology.
Leverage industry frameworks
Industry frameworks have been developed to support cyber security practices across organizations. These frameworks provide standards for the design, implementation, and management of cyber security programs and can be customized to meet the unique requirements of your local government.
Some examples of industry cyber security frameworks include:
Take protective measures
Protective measures such as implementing operational technology (OT) security environments and ensuring that your systems are constantly monitored can help reduce risks to your municipal organization. Developing a risk-based patch and vulnerability program can also help mitigate threats to organizational data and information.
Discuss cyber insurance coverage and identify any potential gaps with your management team. Additionally, subscribing to an ongoing threat intelligence program can help keep your local government’s data and sensitive information safe from cyber attacks.
Perform regular assessments
Regular assessments such as a crown jewel assessment can help your local government identify and prioritize the protection of its most important information. This type of assessment will help you to identify the crown jewels of your municipal organization, such as citizen data or financial records. After the identification process is complete, the assessment team will review vulnerabilities and risks, evaluate security measures, and allocate resources to protect these valuable assets.
Additionally, a third party can perform assessments such as maturity assessments, penetration testing, breach assessments, and simulation testing. This will help you to identify areas where your security is at risk and the measures you can take to reduce cyber threats.
Create an incident response plan
An incident response plan can help your local government effectively respond to security breaches or cyber attacks. Incident response plans focus on minimizing the impact of a cyber attack, limiting damages, and resuming operations quickly after an incident occurs.
Incident response plans help to categorize incidents, delegate roles and responsibilities, and outline a communication plan. These plans also detail steps to contain the attack and processes to investigate the incident to prevent similar threats from occurring in the future.
Collaborate with other municipalities
Many local governments are facing the same risks as digital transformation increases. It may be helpful to collaborate with other municipal organizations to increase threat intelligence or create a joint Security Operations Centre (SOC). These partnerships can help reduce the cost of your cyber security measures and provide comprehensive protection against new and established threats.
Make security a shared responsibility
Your employees work with sensitive information every day and play a critical role in protecting your organizational data. It is important to emphasize that security is a shared responsibility of all employees and to ensure that they understand how to manage sensitive information to prevent data leaks and breaches.
Invest in training programs to help raise awareness of common threats such as phishing campaigns. These programs can also educate your employees on the steps they can take to mitigate risks, who to contact if they suspect a security breach has occurred, and how to respond to a cyber attack.
It is more important than ever to enhance cyber security and privacy measures as the digital landscape continues to evolve. Implementing these best practices in your local government can help your organization protect itself and its citizens from the disruption of critical infrastructure and services:
- Review risks
- Leverage industry frameworks
- Take protective measures
- Perform regular assessments
- Create an incident response plan
- Collaborate with other municipalities
- Make security a shared responsibility
Connect with us to get started
Our team of dedicated professionals can help you determine which options are best for you and how adopting these kinds of solutions could transform the way your organization works. For more information, and for extra support along the way, contact our team.