Public sector agencies are at significant risk for cybercrime, no matter their size or level of government. While U.S. federal government agencies are high-profile targets for bad actors, in 2020 44 percent of global ransomware attacks targeted municipalities, and experts have declared state and local governments to be under siege.
In this environment, no agency is safe. In November 2022 alone, hackers targeted a wide range of government entities including: Bahraini government websites; the Danish State Railways network; Pakistani politicians, generals, diplomats, and military; the Vanuatu government’s digital services; the Guadeloupe government; and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
There are five key reasons why hackers often target government agencies:
Considerations for Securing Digital Government
As government agencies create new ways for constituents to engage, enhance operations, embrace the world of remote work, and adopt technologies to enable innovation and growth, they are often unintentionally increasing the ways that bad actors can access their systems and data. This puts government entities as well as citizens at risk.
Public sector entities must be security conscious, with governance, compliance, and data security top priorities. DevSecOps, a cultural approach to application security, can help by introducing security early in the development cycle and embedding security into the software development process. This enables rapid and secure modernization of applications, ultimately improving Salesforce governance.
However there are challenges to consider in the implementation of secure DevSecOps. These challenges include:
As the only Salesforce-native solution of its kind, the Flosum platform can help secure infrastructure, networks and data. Because of the native integration, Flosum doesn’t allow data to leave Salesforce or the government cloud, and thus inherits the tight security and controls of the Salesforce environment.
Using Salesforce with Flosum gives government entities flexible and secure tools to better manage their critical business processes and serve their constituents.
As government entities work to implement and create responsive and secure applications, it is critical to build security into the CI/CD pipeline. This reduces complexity and removes some of the traditional development challenges, enables entities to manage their cybersecurity posture, and lets developers focus on what they do best — build useful software applications.
Learn more about how Flosum is the Salesforce-native application of choice for public sector agencies by watching the webinar Federal Success Through Salesforce DevSecOps.