On December 8, 2021, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) released its 2022 annual top 10 priorities list identifying the most pressing technology and policy issues that state CIOs are prioritizing for the upcoming year.

Adhering closely to the U.S. federal government’s top legislative priorities for 2022, state chief information officers (CIO’s) have once again ranked cybersecurity as their top priority for 2022, following an already established decade-long trend in this direction.

Recent signals by the U.S. federal government suggest that customer experience (CX), primarily citizen-facing services will receive attention and investment from funding sources like the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). The initial $311 million awarded by the TMF primarily went to projects focused on cybersecurity in keeping with stated priorities and the prevalence of cybersecurity threats. From the beginning, however, TMF has emphasized CX projects that focus on how taxpayers engage with government services in secure digital environments.

President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2022 (FY22) into law on December 27, 2021. It authorizes $770 billion in defense spending which is a 5% increase over last year. This marks 61 consecutive years that a bill received bipartisan support from congress (a display of agreement that has become increasingly rare for DC politics).

With another busy year behind us, it’s time to look ahead to fiscal year (FY) 2022. The official information technology (IT) budget request is $97B, a 4% increase over FY21, which would be a new record. Of course, those numbers undercount all the IT spending that goes unreported. Furthermore, remaining provisions in the American Rescue Plan, the Technology Modernization Fund and IT provisions in the Infrastructure Bill will represent additional pockets of opportunity worth billions for channel partners and technology vendors.

There are a variety of excellent reasons to use containers. They're more agile and consume fewer resources than virtual machines. They provide more flexibility and security than running applications directly on the OS. They are easy to orchestrate at massive scale using platforms like Kubernetes.

This time last year, the CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch™ reported on mounting cyber threats facing organizations as they raced to adopt work-from-home practices and adapt to constraints imposed by the rapidly escalating COVID-19 crisis. Unfortunately, the 12 months that followed have offered little in the way of reprieve for defenders. The past year has been marked by some of the most significant and widespread cyberattacks the world has seen.

Zero Trust is an approach to network security which assumes that just because something is on your network, doesn’t necessarily mean it is trustworthy. Zero Trust allows organizations to apply security controls to network traffic within the perimeter, not just at the edge.

Current IT modernization initiatives are challenging federal agencies to implement significant changes to their infrastructure at a breakneck pace. As they look to keep pace with an increasingly sophisticated cyber threat environment and accommodate workflows shifting to the cloud, the federal government is looking to zero trust as a solution. Zero trust is a security model that maintains secure access to data and applications based on dynamic security policies reacting to access request specifics, as opposed to the network from where access originates.

The Zero Trust (ZT) architecture is a modern concept shaping cybersecurity in the public and private sectors. The growing use of SaaS applications, migration to cloud-based architecture, a rising number of remote employees, and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) have rendered perimeter-based security obsolete. The concept of a network perimeter where those outside of the enterprise's control are malicious and insiders are trustworthy — is no longer a viable approach to cybersecurity.