State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

The telework rush tested states’ cybersecurity, IT maturity

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.

As Daniel Dister, chief information security officer for the State of New Hampshire, watched staff leave government offices to work from home, ZIP codes or even states away, he said he sometimes had no choice but to vet and approve new tools with “just one-tenth” of the time normally afforded for such sensitive decisions.

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