According to a 2020-dated cybersecurity survey from SolarWinds Public Sector, only 57 percent of IT operations and security decision-makers across government agencies rated their agency’s cybersecurity capabilities as suitably mature.

Budget limits and a lack of faith in the team’s competence are said to be the most significant hurdles to cybersecurity maturity.

Bad actors adopt new approaches and methods to thwart security teams’ inventive ways of blocking specific attacks. To make matters even worse, the digital ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace. Endpoints, services, and an even larger reliance on the cloud are all adding to security teams’ workloads.

In light of this, here are some of the best ways public-sector IT workers may improve their agency’s cybersecurity maturity:

• Recognize that cutting-edge solutions do not always imply maturity.

Despite the fact that basic solutions such as endpoint protection, threat intelligence, and identity and access management are evolving, businesses still tend to go toward the products with the most bells and whistles.

Unfortunately, many of these have features that aren’t actually required. These costly solutions might disperse resources and investment dollars, jeopardizing the security maturity of an organization.

With budgets tightening and prices rising, organizations must prioritize security investments based on risk to address important vulnerabilities, concerns, and exposures. IT pros need not chase the latest shiny things because the market is swamped with incredibly mature, cost-effective, and capable solutions to promote cybersecurity maturity where it’s required the most.

• Endpoint security should be a top priority.

Even for solutions that have been available for a long time, such as endpoint security, effective governance is still lacking, according to the poll. While 57 percent say they are the most mature in endpoint protection, roughly 40% say they are not.

The largest issue for security teams is that as the network perimeter grows, especially over distant employees’ personal devices, endpoint protection solutions can become expensive to deploy and buy.

A careful investigation of the risk profiles across numerous endpoints is one technique to get around this problem. Security teams can focus on essential or at-risk assets, such as servers, rather than end-user systems, using this knowledge.

With budget constraints still an issue, agencies can use existing technology investments to improve protection across lower-risk assets, ensuring that there are no gaps in the organization’s security.

• Use automation to your advantage.

One easy strategy to improve cybersecurity maturity is to use AI and machine learning to improve security solutions using existing resources. Among the tasks that next-generation automated security technologies can perform are identifying potential threats, detecting unauthorized behavior, countering and blocking attacks before they are carried out, applying intelligence to qualify incidents, and stopping the unauthorized movement of data, to name a few.

Agencies may continue to evolve their cybersecurity architecture as machine learning and artificial intelligence becomes more widespread in the security sector, allowing them to respond quickly to shifting digital threats.

• Creating a cybersecurity awareness culture

Technology will never be enough to ensure cybersecurity maturity; the entire agency must commit to a holistic security program that recognizes the cybersecurity risk represented by contractors and workers.

Careless or uneducated insiders, including contractors, were named as the main threat by 52% of all survey respondents. That is why organizations must endeavor to build a security culture.

Instilling common sense in the workforce about what to look out for, best practices, and what to do in specific instances can make a big difference in the security posture of the organization.

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