Avoiding gaps in state and local cyber protection as talent supply catches up with demand

According to Cyber Seek, there are more than 36,000 cybersecurity job openings in the public sector, and on average, cybersecurity roles take 21% longer to fill than other IT jobs. As state and local governments work diligently to build teams and close cybersecurity talent gaps, they must avoid gaps in cyber protection altogether. Elastic can help with powerful security solutions that are a force multiplier for teams of all sizes, and are easy to learn.

During this wave of cyber recruiting and hiring, how can state and local governments continuously improve their ongoing cyber operations?

Improve visibility into your ecosystem

The latest Deloitte-NASCIO Cybersecurity Study found that the top three areas of cyber operations with audit-identified gaps are access control, configuration management, and audit and accountability. Each of these areas has to do with visibility into the IT ecosystem, and if you don’t have the tools to ingest data at scale and visualize the activity, then you can’t manage the ecosystem properly.

With Elastic Agent, installed with a single command, you can easily establish role-based and attribute-based access control, gaining better visibility of user metadata. With Kibana, our easy-to-learn visualization tool, users perform configuration management and open API integrations with drag and drop functionality. And with Elastic frozen data tier, we make it easy to retain and query older data needed for audit and accountability. Improved ecosystem visibility all on a single platform from Elastic.

Optimize system integrity with data

Another area that the cybersecurity study found to be an area of improvement is in system and information integrity. Here we use NIST’s definition of system integrity where a system performs its intended function in an unimpaired manner, free from unauthorized manipulation of the system. The only way to know if a system is truly performing in this way is to gather data and observe any anomalies with machine learning.

With Elastic Agent, you can bring your logs, metrics, and APM traces together at scale to monitor and react to events happening anywhere in your ecosystem. For instance, with Elastic you’d be able to observe anomalies like overcommitted memory on a virtual machine that can shut down important system processes or multiple email addresses used for the same social service claim, perhaps indicating fraudulent activity.

Use out-of-the box detections for incident response

A third area of improvement according to the study and exacerbated by increased cyber criminal activity as a result of the pandemic, is in the area of incident response. To stay ahead of threats as they manage the cyber talent gap, CIOs need powerful detections with precision response, proven to work out of the box.

With limitless XDR, we unify SIEM and endpoint security out of the box to accelerate a security team’s ability to triage, investigate, escalate and respond to threats. We know that cyber criminals target anyone, not just those with SOCs, and with limitless XDR we help teams of all sizes to prevent, detect, and respond to advanced threats including ransomware and malware. What do we mean by limitless? Limitless visibility, limitless data, limitless analysis, and limitless usage - learn more in this related blog or in our recent ElasticON Global presentation.

Determine fit for your purpose

There’s no better way to determine a fit for your purpose than to see Elastic in action. Because Elastic is a free and open platform, we can offer your team a free 30-day trial, a workshop or capture the flag event, and broader access to our user community to get started. The feedback we get from evaluations like this is that the Elastic platform is easy to learn, integrates better than the competition, and scales seamlessly once new cyber talent is brought on to the team.

Start your free cloud-based or on-premises trial today, and get in touch with sled@elastic.co if you need more information. You may also visit us at elastic.co/industries/public-sector/state-and-local.