Key Security Concerns for Public Sector
The Public sector can include many different areas of service such as healthcare, education, public parks, community libraries and more. Likewise, the judicial system, law enforcement and other government entities are vital components of the public sector. Cybersecurity has increasingly become a major concern for the public sector, since they face a challenging new reality when implementing today’s “boundless” infrastructures: a spiraling threat to data security. Driving this growing threat are the evolving trends of mobility, cloud computing, and advanced targeted attacks, which combined can create big challenges and blockers for IT administrators.
Phishing, ransomware, and malware are some of the most common security threats faced by public sector organizations. Stolen personal data is also often used to commit online frauds and identity thefts. This industry is also at risk from illegal crypto mining, cyber espionage and software supply chain attack.
Government data is disproportionately valuable to our economy, critical for citizen services, and foundational to almost all government decision-making. This data comes from millions of interconnected devices and managed by thousands of government systems, that is why cyber security is a key element of nearly every government strategy, to make sure all devices, employees and data are secure and protected. Government organizations are performing triage activities to continue their current cyber operations and expand services to protect remote workers.
How Can Public Sector Secure their Environment?
Microsoft recognizes that Modern cybercrime is a global enterprise and has been engaged and involved in worldwide legislative and enforcement efforts to drive consistency and coordination for more effective action, innovation to defeat criminals, and to help minimize the impact of cybercrime for customers. Also, Microsoft continues to update and consolidate its suite of offerings to help customers worldwide centralize and automate more of their security operations with all the benefits that the Cloud can bring.
Microsoft Endpoint Manager to Deliver a Modern Workplace
One of the products that helps public sector organizations to secure their environments is Microsoft Endpoint Manager. It helps deliver the modern workplace and modern management to keep the data secure, both in the cloud and on-premises. Endpoint Manager includes the services and tools you use to manage and monitor mobile devices, desktop computers, virtual machines, embedded devices, and servers.
For an agency to retain its commitment to the constituents it serves and uphold data privacy standards, implicit trust within a data estate no longer makes sense. An end-to-end Zero Trust approach aims to build security into the entire digital estate, across your identities (usernames and passwords), devices, network, infrastructure, applications, and data. On top of that, the Zero Trust security model adheres to the three pillars below:
- Explicit verification of every access request;
- Use of least privileged access with just-in-time adaptive risk-based access policies;
- Assume breach mentality to minimize potential damage to, or loss of data from, additional parts of the organization.
Sensitivity labels. Classify and Protect Your Organization's Data
Sensitivity labels from the Microsoft Information Protection solution let you classify and protect your organization’s data, while making sure that user productivity and their ability to collaborate isn’t interrupted.
Also, they allow you to classify and protect content that is sensitive to your business by classifying and protecting content regardless the location. This allows users to continue to collaborate and let the sensitivity label support the protection. These labels are actual metadata written into the document, which means that they travel with the document as it moves.
Sensitivity labels can be applied:
- Manually
- Automatically
- Prompt for a recommendation if certain information found within the working file.
Need Some Help?
If you’d like to know how public sector organizations can secure their environments and get support to monitor critical infrastructure (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS) using Azure Sentinel, reach out to our specialists here and we’ll connect with you to hear about your particular needs.
