A government's collection and management of data is continuous and endless, from distributed city data to citizens' sensitive information, from social security and financial to health data. Governments deal with large amounts of information twenty-four-seven, so they need to achieve a wide range of data privacy and regulations; therefore, it is imperative to implement government security systems to keep all data safe.
The recent experience of the pandemic uncovered the lack of suitable ICT in governments around the world. The public sector institutions are not designed to provide for citizens and adapt to sudden changes or unexpected crises. We know there is a pending task in terms of connectivity, which is why it's essential to be digitally connected. As governments can not stop the information because it's continuously used, especially for public services, it has to be available to access at any time.
Check Point Research (CPR) statistics about cyberattacks trends in 2022 indicate that cyberattacks' global growth from 2021 to 2022 is 38%. Anticipating the increase in artificial intelligence (AI) development might accelerate the number of cyberattacks in 2023. It also indicates governments were one of the three most attacked industries in 2022, showing why it's vital for governments to increase their data security solutions. These include storage, backup, recovery, implementing advanced encryption and authentication methods, staff training on cybersecurity risks and procedures, and protecting their systems by investing in advanced technologies.
The effectiveness of data security is essential for government services; therefore, the collection, analysis, and storage of data must be well-secured. The only way governments can change this is to strengthen data measures by upgrading infrastructure and creating better practices and procedures to ensure everyone's information is secure.
Governments have to address various digital transformation challenges. The main ones are the following:
Security
Governments are constantly cyberattacking targets. They manage so much sensitive data that they need imperatively to take care of upgrading their technological systems. They must ensure data security, critical services, and infrastructure disruptions. Most governments still have traditional procedures that make everyone in the network vulnerable (citizens), so governments must invest in upgrading their technological systems and solid embedded cybersecurity solutions.
Infrastructure
Most countries still own old technology systems, which makes it hard to manage and maintain good connectivity across the networks, and makes the infrastructures vulnerable. Data must be perfectly secure; therefore, any government security system must guarantee data storage, recovery, and backup.
Cost-effectiveness
Governments must balance their investments in technology upgrades with the utility they will gain, e.g., education, health, and social services. Digital transformation's advanced technology comprehensive systems can be expensive, but governments must evaluate the cost-effectiveness to ensure the most effective use of their resources.
Meeting regulatory requirements
Governments operate in multiple jurisdictions and handle different sensitive data types. Regulatory compliance can be particularly challenging for government agencies. Data breaches and cyber-attacks in the government can lead to the loss of confidential information, identity theft, and other dangerous consequences. This is why it is required from the government ecosystem to invest in embedded security solutions and experienced staff.
Sustainability
While addressing better infrastructure and solutions to better public services, governments must use technology and all other resources sustainably. It is vital to handle reducing carbon footprint emissions and energy consumption.
Addressing these challenges requires a collective approach that involves policymakers, IT professionals, and every stakeholder in the government ecosystem. They have to provide broad strategies for data security solutions and engage with the private sector to ensure leveraging the latest technological innovations.
Current security solutions and strategies used for security in government ecosystems are outdated or siloed. It is essential to consider new technologies to experience a seamless digital transformation by considering the challenges and opportunities that a system like this can offer to such complex ecosystems as the government.
Choosing the best technology can be challenging, especially for critical aspects such as security responsibilities. That is why the best option is to adopt advanced technologies for government-embedded systems.
A decentralized embedded system, implemented with blockchain technology and other advanced technologies, can provide the best data security solutions. In addition, possibilities for deploying all kinds of embedded solutions to offer improved efficiency, sustainability, cost savings, etc.
The main benefits a decentralized system offers embedded security are the following:
Improved security
Compared with a centralized system's single point of attack vulnerability, a decentralized system offers more security by distributing the data across all the nodes in the network, making it more difficult for hackers to access it. Additionally, the blockchain encrypts the data, providing a tampered-proof ledger, which allows control and transparency across all the users in the ecosystem. Significantly helpful for zero-trust environments.
Secure data storage
A decentralized embedded system is implemented with blockchain, making data storage scalability and flexibility easy. Data is distributed and stored across all the nodes in the network, minimizing the risk of cyberattacks or data branches. As we mentioned above, the blockchain encrypts the data, which provides security and transparency by ensuring control of all the users in the network.
Disaster recovery
Adopting decentralized embedded systems makes stored data used as a backup. A copy of the data across all the nodes is available, which allows access to it at any time; and ensures the system keeps working even if a node or more fails.
In addition, a decentralized embedded system allows for achieving sustainability because it is energy-efficient. Having a distributed infrastructure of nodes permits the usage of the resources of all of them collaboratively, reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint emissions compared to traditional centralized systems.
Now that we have mentioned the existing challenges and benefits of embedded security. Let's look at an example of how an embedded system can solve security problems:
A citizen is assisted in a hospital for a medical emergency, and the hospital needs access to the citizen's medical records from the health department. This department has implemented an application on the decentralized system with blockchain, safely sharing medical records with authorized hospitals for emergencies. In the blockchain, medical records are stored encrypted, and distributed across all the nodes in the decentralized infrastructure.
For the hospital to access the information, it needs to request authorization from the health department, that verifies the access authorization for the hospital to provide it with a temporary key. The hospital uses this key to access the data in the blockchain. Once the citizen's emergency is resolved, the temporary key is revoked to ensure the safety of the data.
The embedded security solution provides safe access to sensitive data without compromising the confidentiality of the citizen, which is the best way to ensure secure data.
Using a decentralized system implemented with blockchain for data security solutions guarantees citizen's confidential data, government documents, or any other sensitive information can be stored and shared safely. Giving easy access to authorized parties and assuring that data is available even in a disaster or system failure.
In a disaster situation data is easily recovered from stored data across the nodes in the network. Since the data is distributed in the decentralized system, governments can ensure the data is backed up and can be quickly recovered in a disaster event such as a natural disaster, a cyberattack, etc. Additionally, a decentralized system will offer cost savings compared to a centralized system.
Internet of Everything Corporation created the Eden system. It is a decentralized infrastructure with advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), providing government security solutions while providing connectivity, automation, and sustainability.
In services such as AI, it is critical to receive reliable data at all times; interruptions in the data flow or the injection of erroneous data can lead to grave consequences. Eden system was designed with this in mind, implementing blockchain to constantly verify the consistency of data using sustainable computing to ensure data reliability.
Computing orchestration and storage is done with service manifests describing the rules, policies, and logic of the services. Its autonomous knowledge-based AI manages the orchestration mechanics through network consensus on the blockchain as the decision mechanism. Eden orchestrator also takes care of the scalability and failover of the services.
Eden system uses verification and sanity checks for bad data and player detection on the data entering and circulating across Eden. It has malware detection via data transfer checksum consensus in the blockchain, as the checksums from the transferred data will not match the received data over the nodes.
Eden permits sensitive data management and storage, likes citizens' information and government documents. It is possible to deploy and update secrets and application configuration without having to rebuild the repository or expose secrets in the service.
The resilient design of the Eden system is its decentralized, virtual, autonomous, portable, and secure infrastructure for managing clustered workloads through decentralized pods (DePos) and services that facilitate declarative configuration and automation.
The transition to the Eden system is easy, however, it is advisable to start small and focus on the critical systems, and embed the current installations in Eden instead of replacing them. In this way, you can focus on the new solutions that can be implemented.
To complete IoE Corporation's integral service, we have created the Planet Partner program, to create partnerships with joint goals. Our goal is to accompany you throughout, with Eden System, tutorials, training, and overall support, and constant updates and material helping to keep the system ready.
We are waiting to hear from you, please feel free to apply.
