Make no mistake, the public sector terrain is a hunting hotspot for cybercriminals across the globe. Government databases are rich with sensitive personal information of billions, critical national strategies and secrets, internal operations data and reports, telemetry and military information, and more, an unsurprisingly inviting proposition to the dark world.  Despite IT management involvements from the most renowned corporate organizations, cutting-edge technologies, near real-time support, and much more, governments have been losing billions each year over digital malice. The average impact cost of a single data breach in the public sector domain has been a whopping 2 million dollars; there are usually tens of thousands of cyberattacks inflicting public databases each year. Now, do the math!

A Maligned Reality!

Following are some of the worst government or public sector data breaches in recent history:

A Maligned Reality!

Exploring the Why: The Security and Continuity Loopholes in Government Operations

Government operations are unprecedently complex involving multiple policies and approaches, vendors, and software solutions. Audit processes are manual-intensive leaving room for errors. Apart from regular governance functionalities, mass public undertakings aren’t fool-proof in terms of blueprinting and POC designing, partner selection, resource management, billing, policy, and compliance checks, etc. National IT and security policies fall short in addressing all use cases in an unfathomably fast-changing digital world. Making matters worse, public sector services often lag when it comes to end-user experiences, creating unwanted delays and deadlocks.

Summing up, below are the major public sector operational lags resulting in substantial continuity and security worries:

  • Legacy On-prem Systems and Architectures: Most government offices are slow to adapt to the changing architecture needs. Judicial, banking, commerce, police departments still operate on archaic, on-prem systems and applications that significantly thwart continuity and security.  
  • Lack of Asset Universality: Local, regional, and national-level public sector agencies or government corporations significantly lag behind when it comes to having a common underlying architecture in terms of databases, enterprise applications, etc. This doesn’t hold even within the same departments with regional and national teams operating with different platforms and services.
  • Framework Updates: It’s a no-brainer that software solutions and infra systems need to be periodically upgraded to match the international quality standards. While corporate vendors developing and managing governance platforms do cater to the same, the activity largely falls behind once it’s handed over to the public entity. Periodic monitoring is absent.
  • Multiple Vendors: As mentioned prior, government agencies work with multiple vendors at multiple levels of a project. Not only this creates utter non-synchronicity at the IT perspectives, but also creates rooms for redundant workflows and over-provisioning of resources.
  • In-efficient Monitoring and Resource Crunch: Government agencies seldom appoint independent IT health monitoring and security counselling firms to test their existing infra, platforms, and applications. Lack of adequate in-house resources exacerbates the issue. These leaves a major hole in-terms of continuity and security, leading to frequent long-hour downtimes in government operations. 
Bring out the Cloud: The AWS Promise to Bolster Public Sector Operations

It’s time government and public sector organizations embrace the advanced capabilities of cloud platforms. A reality made visible post pandemic, migrations operations and databases to cloud allows public sector organizations unparalleled benefits in terms of operational continuity, scalability, data security, and IT costs management. Regardless of workflow and use-case complexities, custom-designed cloud platforms allow seamless transformations at near-zero operational disruption.

For years, AWS cloud has been at the forefront of innovations involving public sector undertakings and governance. In a bid to help governments promote and effectively serve citizen missions, AWS has launched custom cloud solutions for the public sector terrain. Over the years, AWS-based software solutions have powered numerous public healthcare, education, manufacturing, and development undertakings delivering hyper-agility performances, industry best uptime, highly available services, and world-class intelligent security. Following is a deeper dive:

  • Universal Monitoring and Visibility:  AWS promises highly scalable operations with super visibility and control. Induce real-time monitoring of assets and gain automated alerting for internal-external risks. Leverage AWS Security Hub as a unified security and compliance control platform and Amazon GuardDuty for world-class managed detection and service. 
  • Minimize Ecosystem Complexities: Avail agile security platforms and solutions on AWS catering to any IT environment or resources, apps, endpoints. Leverage AWS Identity and Access Management, Amazon Cognito, AWS Directory Service, AWS Resource Access Manager, AWS IoT Device Defender, AWS Firewall Manager, Amazon Inspector, AWS Shield, AWS Network Firewall, Amazon Macie, AWS Key Management Service, Amazon Detective, etc.   
  • Platform Reliability: Integrate advanced information security and computing solutions on the AWS platform. Investigate potential security issues anywhere with Amazon Detective, track user activity and API usage with AWS CloudTrail, evaluate AWS resource configuration with AWS Config, securely share AWS resources with AWS Resource Access Manager and AWS IAM.
  • Optimization and Cost Management: Eliminate the need for dedicated hardware and IT infra to handle security and risk management queries while on AWS. Continuously audit AWS resources to optimize future compliance, risk assessment mishaps, and costs with AWS Audit Manager. Avail fast, cost-effective, and automated Disaster Recovery with CloudEndure Disaster Recovery.  
  • Resource Management: Reduce manual interventions. Avail Single-sign-on service with AWS Single Sign-on. Gain central governance and administration across all AWS accounts and resources with AWS Organizations, AWS Resource Access Manager. Record and evaluate configurations of your AWS resources with AWS Config.
  • Incident and Access Management: Significantly reduce mean time to detection and mean time to repair with Advanced Managed Detection and Response on AWS cloud. Leverage Amazon GuardDuty for intelligent managed detection services. Discover, explore, and protect sensitive data with Amazon Macie. Rotate, manage, and retrieve loophole secrets with AWS Secrets Manager. Integrate identity and access management tools  
  • Policy and Compliance Management:  Fine tune architectures with ease according to changing compliances. Avail AWS Artifact as a no-cost, self-service solution for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Utilize AWS CloudHSM with hardware-based key storage for regulatory compliance. Provision, manage and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates with AWS Certificate Manager. 
Making AWS Journeys Simpler and Efficient: The Role of Managed Service Providers

The impact of hyperscaler cloud platforms such as AWS to fortify public sector operations cannot be over-emphasized. Unfortunately, adoption rates are still low across the world, especially in third-world economies. A major reason behind this negative inertia could be the perceived complications behind migrating large-scale, variant ecosystems to the cloud. Lack of efficient planning could lead to significant disruptions, financial losses, and data leakages.

This is where the alliance between AWS and its Managed Service Providers like Cloud4C comes in. While AWS has catered to over 6500 government agencies across the globe, the undertakings have been realized with MSPs handling everything, fail-proof migration, management, and security in the middle. As the world’s largest application-focused, automation-driven Cloud Managed Service Provider, Cloud4C has addressed numerous AWS transformations across the APAC, EMEA, and the Americas. A key accelerator to these missions has been Cloud4C’s advanced Managed AWS Cybersecurity portfolio, an array of world-class, intelligent security solutions, technologies, and frameworks powered by AWS that guarantees deep threat discovery and hunting, threat analysis and remediation, real-time risk and continuity monitoring, and smart endpoint-edge security solutions. 

With billions of devices, assets directly or indirectly leveraging public infra and databases, successful endpoint threat management would itself be game-changing. Below is a detailed capability map:

Advanced Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Intrigued to explore the execution and implementation tactics? Why not start with a FREE Cybersecurity Assessment Workshop?  
 

A Recognition that Inspires to do Greater Things:

Cloud4C is now part of AWS Public Sector Partner Program

AWS Partner Program (APN) is a growing community of managed partners supporting serving the cloud vision across foundational industries: healthcare, FSI, Government, Education, Non-profit, etc. Being a member exposes Cloud4C to a wide array of possibilities and the chance to extend transformative managed cloud offerings to public sector organizations. Cloud4C is committed to the cause of augmenting, reshaping economies towards a digital-first vision, powered by global cloud platforms such as AWS where data security, continuity, and top-notch service becomes first-class citizens.  

A step forward to empower billions.  

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Author
Team Cloud4C
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Author
Team Cloud4C

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