Can State and Local Govs Benefit from the U.S. Commerce Department's Cybersecurity Program?

Data breaches are inevitable.

As Michigan CSO Dan Lohrmann noted earlier this year, small security breaches occur in government more often than many people are aware of -- and then there are the large, widely publicized breaches, most recently in California, the Washington State Courts and last year at the South Carolina Department of Revenue. Despite their inevitability, however, governments nationwide focus even further on cybersecurity -- and the U.S. Department of Commerce is no exception. But the difference for this federal-level agency is that it's working to assemble its own team of experts in cybersecurity, which it is has done by increasing the role-based training completion rate by threefold over the last three years.

And this federal-level training initiative will undoubtedly affect both state and local governments as well, says Rod Turk, chief information security officer and Office of Cyber Security director at the department.