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CYBERSECURITY:
REIMAGINE
EMPLOYEE TRAINING
Government employees are weary of cybersecurity. After countless attacks in 2021, agencies need innovations that can recharge their workers’ cybersecurity enthusiasm. Fresh ideas are the best way to re-engage teams, which in turn can revitalize agencies’ cybersecurity efforts.
& ADD A C K N OW L E D G E
RESS
E U G I T A F R E CYB A barrage of agency emails, bulletins and news alerts inundate employees with reminders to stay vigilant. But information overload is a real concern. “We as humans can only take a measured amount of that, so we have to be judicious, and we have to make sure that we don’t just make it so common and so easily ignorable,” said Christopher Rein, Chief Technology Officer for New Jersey. “It’s like that email you get every five minutes; pretty soon, you’re not going to even open them. You’re just going to click and delete. You don’t want that to happen with cybersecurity.”
“It’s a battle, and it needs to be fought every day,” Rein said. That battle will look different for every agency and employee, depending on their roles, but the key is helping employees view and treat cybersecurity as a core responsibility. Agencies should show their workers how to remain sharp when it comes to security habits and practices while ensuring that their message resonates and ties to understandable outcomes.
The stakes are high. Public trust is only as strong as a government’s ability to do what it says it will do, which includes protecting people’s private data. “What we’re really selling is confidence to our citizens — confidence that we can protect their data, we can secure it, we can give them secure access to systems,” Rein said. Agencies must be intentional about when and how they communicate security-related issues with their workforces. Innovations that Mattered in 2021
