State leaders will ‘rethink’ traditional security parameters post-pandemic

State and local government leaders looking toward the future of government after the coronavirus pandemic ends will need to adjust their approach to cybersecurity to accommodate new work styles, Okta’s Kelsey Nelson says in a video interview.

“As we’re starting to really move into this long term work from home, or really, the ability to work in a distributed workforce in the future, how do we rethink those traditional security parameters?” Nelson, Okta’s senior manager for product marketing solutions, says in the interview.

As that work environment changes, Nelson says state and local government agency leaders are looking at concepts like zero trust to start to “bring together different facets of a modern security stack.” Identity and access management will be a key part of that, she says.

“Marrying [identity] with things like endpoint security and device security [will] really round out that broader security strategy,” Nelson says.

The evolution of cybersecurity and identity strategy in state and local governments comes as government CIOs find themselves with a more prominent role in government leadership than ever before, according to the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ annual CIO survey. For Nelson, that means CIOs and IT leaders finally have the platform they need to push forward discussions about the future of digital government.

“’How do we start to deliver better experiences to our constituents’ was really important in the CIO survey,” Nelson says. “There’s been a lot of work underway before the pandemic to start to think about digitizing government services, but the pandemic really accelerated that.”

Also, read more from leaders about how state and local agencies are modernizing identity authentication.