As part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, California's tech leaders gathered Tuesday to discuss ongoing issues surrounding the state's security. Amy Tong, California's CIO, Marybel Batjer, secretary of Government Operations, Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, and Christine Miller, CIO of California State University, Sacramento spoke at the beginning of the event, emphasizing collaboration across agencies in the effort to secure the state's interests.
“I want to stress how important this cooperation is and has been. If we are to be successful in preventing and minimizing any attacks on our system, it is essential that we are open and frank with each other,” Batjer said.
GovOps has led the way in coordinating that collaboration and attempting to streamline technology, especially cybersecurity, hiring processes.
“While the state vacancy rate remains fairly constant at 13 percent, IT vacancy rates have shown incremental growth over the past three years. This is because certain IT skill sets are difficult to recruit and to retain,” Batjer said.
GovOps is reclassifying all IT positions and opening up cybersecurity-focused apprenticeships within state service and across all agencies.
The theme of collaboration was echoed by Ghilarducci in his introduction of the California Cybersecurity Integration Center. Working together offers more information about threats, he said.
“The general sense is, once you get hit, particularly if you are a company or an entity, state government, you don’t tell anybody, you keep it to yourself because you don’t want anyone to know, you just want to fix the problem. But you can’t do that anymore; you need to be working collectively,” Ghilarducci said.
Miller also discussed working together, because it offers more resources when entities with smaller security shops are hit.
“We may have fewer resources than our private-sector colleagues … yet we have the same expectation in terms of preventing incidents and protecting information assets,” Miller said.
