Cyber Security and Mobile Devices Security are Top Priorities for US Government

A study from the Lockheed Martin and its Cyber Security Alliance partners found that 85 percent of federal technology leaders and decision makers consider cyber security as a top most priority for Federal verticals, followed to a lesser degree by mobile computing (39%), cloud computing (26%) and big data (27%).

The results of a collaborative cyber security survey in a new white paper titled “Cyber Security and Transformational Technologies” see cyber security threats along with new budget constraints and shifting administration priorities, integrating new technologies and managing cloud as a high priority and major initiatives underway in federal, defense/military and intelligence agencies

The study suggested that while government agencies are actively implementing initiatives involving cloud computing, mobile devices and big data, all of them still pose security risks and challenges. Government’s challenge is two-fold, adopting transformational technologies to help reduce operating costs while also keeping systems and data safe.

More than 90% of all respondents said they are quite prepared to deal with 8 of these top 10 cyber threats including malware, spam, phishing, accidental data leakage, data breaches, social engineering, cyber espionage, insiders and mobile. The majority of study participants agree to opt for an integrated solution optimizing all segments of the implementation, including virtualization, network, computer/servers, storage, and applications.

Federal community clouds are anticipated to be used by 52% of federal IT professionals, where two or more agencies share the same cloud, while 42% expect to use private clouds and 21% of government IT professionals are comprised of hybrid clouds. The top three cited benefits reported in the study were easy and flexible access and usability, cost savings and added infrastructure efficiency.

Back in 2011, this study saw that many IT professionals in the government expressed concern about cyber security in the cloud. This was in part because they did not know enough about the working security under different cloud models to protect sensitive information.

“The promise of cloud computing, when implemented well is effectively invisible to the vast majority of government employees,” the study noted. “While mobility is enticing because it has the potential to radically change how government workers do their jobs.”

Big data has the potential to inject an almost entrepreneurial spirit into the government, as both public and private sectors look to build new models of performance based on information that has been locked away in vast quantities of raw data.