Taking a ‘whole of state’ approach to cybersecurity

The continuing escalation and sophistication of cyber-attacks highlight the increasing importance for state government officials and private sector enterprises to band together in a so-called “whole of state” approach to creating a sustainable cybersecurity defense.

This holistic approach looks at creating a collective defense to better support states and all the entities within.

“[In Arizona] we’re looking at all of our local governments, all of our cities and towns, all of our counties, and even our private sector entities within the state—how do we all come together to better support each other in a collaborative way?” says Arizona Deputy State CISO Ryan Murray in a new StateScoop interview.

Jennifer Pittman-Leeper, Tanium’s whole of state strategist for SLED, highlights the importance of private-public partnerships and highlights how by working together, “you’re combining resources—our resources, their resources, the local entity resources—to find better ways to share information to respond to incidents, to address workforce challenges, and of course, to standardize tool solutions.”

Murray also explains what each organization can get when the private and public sectors come together to support each other.

“It’s about providing better capabilities. There’s no way that government entities can provide the best-in-breed cyber protections that our private sector partners are putting together with all of their research and development.”

He also stresses that information-sharing is a significant benefit explaining that “there’s a ton of fantastic telemetry that our private sector partners are receiving. We’re all being attacked by the same threat actors. So being able to collect and correlate all that information across the entire state of Arizona, both government and private sector partners sharing that information, helps us all to better defend each other.”

Learn more about embracing a whole-of-state cybersecurity approach.

This video interview was produced by Scoop News Group and StateScoop and underwritten by Tanium.