STATETECH: What technologies are you investing in to support security and productivity for long-term hybrid work?
Quinn: There are a number of things that we’ve done and continue to do to build toward this “work from anywhere” type of environment. One of the early policies that we enacted was no more desktops, laptops only, because we want to be flexible. We want to be able to adapt to changing environments and what the future holds —maybe future pandemics, maybe another work-from-home situation next winter.
Not only did we put that policy in place but we’ve enacted a number of cybersecurity tools and policies to ensure that we’re doing all we can to protect our data, our citizens’ data and our network security. We had to expand very quickly from a couple of hundred VPN connections a day to enough to cover a workforce of 10,000.
Our endpoint protection has paid dividends over the past year-plus with people working offsite. We’ve found that people are working from a number of different states throughout this pandemic and coming back into our network. So, some of those security tools that we bought, like CrowdStrike, have really given us visibility and protected our network from a number of potential threats.
VIDEO: How are states securing remote work environments?
STATETECH: What technologies are behind the infrastructure to rapidly roll out digital government services?
Quinn: If it can go in the cloud and it makes sense to go in the cloud, we’re putting in the cloud. We’re working on our procurement language to ensure that we’re off on the right foot and we’re protecting ourselves and our data to the best of our ability. These things that are commodities, however, like cloud services, are things the state shouldn’t be involved with, from my perspective. We have no business running a data center. We don’t have the skill sets and we don’t have the money to run a top-tier data center. These are things that we want to hire professionals for, to let them worry about those types of things.