Month: November 2022

If a group of IT security experts from Ontario municipalities left a recent meeting A: worried, B: feeling vulnerable C: discouraged or D: all of the above, that would not have been surprising, especially after what they had just been told.

The session, which took place earlier this month in Guelph at InfoSec 2022, organized by the Ontario division of the Municipal Information Systems Association (MISA), examined the many emerging ransomware attack threats they all continue to face.

According to Andrew Hunter, a cyber security advisor with Ottawa-based security firm Field Effect, municipalities are a key target to attackers for a number of reasons: “First and foremost, they have data, they own data and criminals are after that. They can monetize it and they can leverage it for other attacks.”

In addition, he said that unlike a small-to-medium-sized business that might be forced to fold because

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Gartner’s latest forecast reveals that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 20.7 per cent to total US$591.8 billion in 2023, up from US$490.3 billion in 2022. This is higher than the 18.8 per cent growth forecast for 2022.

“Current inflationary pressures and macroeconomic conditions are having a push and pull effect on cloud spending,” said Sid Nag, vice president analyst at Gartner. “Cloud computing will continue to be a bastion of safety and innovation, supporting growth during uncertain times due to its agile, elastic and scalable nature.”

Nag added that while cloud spending is growing, organizations can only spend what they have. He said spending could even decrease if overall IT budgets shrink, since cloud is continuing to be the main portion of IT spend and proportionate budget growth. 

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 29.8 per

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The recent release of key recommendations from a group of cyber security experts will form the cornerstone of the Ontario government’s security policies and help in the creation of a four-year strategic plan, the province’s chief information security officer (CISO) Rhonda Bunn said today.

First formed in October 2020, the 10-member expert panel committed to providing the provincial government with a final report within two years that outlines the steps that broader public sector (BPS) organizations, which include school boards, municipalities, hospitals and other provincially funded agencies in Ontario, must take to remain secure.

During her keynote speech in Guelph at InfoSec 2022, organized by the Ontario division of the Municipal Information Systems Association (MISA), Bunn whose formal title is CISO of the province’s cyber security division, Government Information Technology Ontario (GovTechON) and the ministry of public and business service delivery, stressed the need for information-sharing.

When

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