Cybersecurity and Local Government

12 The Future of Local Government Cybersecurity

12.1 Introduction

This chapter discusses a number of cybersecurity issues that local governments are likely to confront in the near future, as well as many years down the line. Indeed, local governments are faced with addressing many of these issues today, although the issues will certainly evolve over time, presenting these governments with new and ever more difficult challenges. These issues are not listed in any particular order and certainly not in order of importance (which would be highly subjective and likely quite controversial). Readers should draw their own judgments regarding the relative importance of each of them. Readers should understand, too, that what the authors have written in 2021 is likely to change over time and present quite differently in a few years.

To give but a few examples, the contents of this chapter include discussions of more hackers and more hacking, more ransomware attacks, the proliferation of IoT devices, and the impacts of Bring Your Own devices. In addition, the chapter covers continuing cybersecurity challenges related to working remotely, legacy technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and much more.

12.2 The Cloud

The “cloud” is a term used to refer to information resources stored by third-party organizations separate from the firms or local governments using those resources. Think of outside providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google Oracle, and others. ...