Government agencies and public sector organizations have often struggled to compete with private companies for talent, a struggle only exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report found that about half of government jobs in the U.S. remain unfilled compared to pre-pandemic numbers.
This creates an even tighter squeeze on the already spent cybersecurity workforce; the White House reported a staggering 700,000 open cybersecurity roles in the U.S. The public sector continues to battle smaller budgets and fewer technical resources, while the challenge to protect the attack surface and anticipate new vulnerabilities becomes increasingly complex.
Public-private partnerships can alleviate the pressure felt by the public sector globally by infusing top-tier talent into critical cybersecurity operations and providing consistent, readily available technology and support.
Government and public sector organizations are charged with keeping a country’s digital borders safe and secure. They’re needed to help keep the lights on, along with a myriad of other critical functions. To do that, organizations routinely test the health of their cybersecurity defenses. But are they getting the results and insight to keep up with today’s sophisticated cyber adversaries?
Stale security practices keep public sector organizations in the past at a time when they need partners to help them operate on par with private companies.
Penetration testing, otherwise known as pentesting, is a technology that is fortunately evolving for the better.
Gone are the days of two people on-site with two laptops who take weeks to deliver a point-in-time report with few actionable insights.
Here’s what modern pentesting can look like: a continuous process to sniff out critical vulnerabilities as they’re known, actionable results built into a seamless platform, and an ability to scale to respond to critical vulnerabilities like Log4j.
The choice between outdated security testing and an agile, responsive pentesting solution to tackle a nation’s most pressing cybersecurity concerns is obvious. Synack provides premier security testing to keep public sector organizations at the top of their game, reducing risk while helping to keep critical data and infrastructure out of adversaries’ hands. Our innovative pentesting solution utilizes the Synack Red Team, a diverse community of more than 1,500 security researchers, and our secure platform to dig deep into web applications, cloud resources and other attack surfaces to find the vulnerabilities that matter most.
Our recent whitepaper, “Government Agencies Deserve a Better Way to Pentest,” lays out the challenge with traditional pentesting and how public sector organizations can respond with maximum efficiency and limited budget.
