July 27, 2023
Transcript:
Samantha Harkins:
Thank you all for joining us. I’m Samantha Harkins. I’m the CEO of the Michigan Municipal Services Authority. MMSA was created about 11 years ago as a way to incentivize local government innovation and collaboration and creative ways to
work together, and to that end, we’ve been having a series of webinars highlighting a number of different topics that are important to not just local government organizations, especially in this case to all organizations, and so I’m really excited. I will caveat I’m excited and terrified for this presentation because cyber security is scary but Mike Coyne and Mike McGowan from Dewpoint, which is based here in downtown Lansing (and my neighborhood) – they are experts. They’re going to give us some tips – some ways to minimize your organizational security risk, and so I’m really excited to turn it over to Mike and Mike and if you have questions please pop them in the chat or Q&A and if it’s something pertinent I’ll be moderating and we’ll jump in. With that I’m going to turn off my camera and let the Mikes do the talking. Thank you gentlemen so much for being here.
Mike Coyne:
Thank you, Samantha, and thank you Kristen for helping us organize this, and thanks to MMSA. I’m assuming that everybody can see my screen here. Today we’re going to talk about managing IT security risk, and you’re right Samantha, this is a scary topic, but
we’re going to try to take some of the scare out of it today. My name is Mike Coyne I’m an account executive at Dewpoint. I’ve been an account executive supporting government in Michigan for the past 23 years. Dewpoint is a full-scale IT consulting company. We’re headquartered in Lansing and today I’m talking to you from our office in Grand Rapids. We’ve been in the business for 27 years and we support many local governments today so there’ll be a spin on this particular discussion around local government, but many of the things you hear today apply to all customers wherever they’re at as a small, medium, or large size business. Through our support of local
government at the city level, both large and small, we’ve gained some experience on what those risks are for those particular customers. In 2021, Dewpoint worked through a competitive process with DTMB and the Michigan Cyber Security Group to be named a Cyber Partner qualified to support IT security initiatives in the local government space, and you’ll hear a little bit more about that later in this presentation. Last year we took on a significant effort to do IT security assessments on all of the Friend of the Court offices in our state. There are over 50 of them, so our years of experience plus the project we worked on last year have really given us some insights in what’s going on from cybersecurity within our state. Today I’m fortunate to have a co-presenter, Mike McGowan. As a co-worker, Mike hits all the boxes. He’s super fun to work with he’s passionate about what he does. Today he’s a humble expert in the fields of IT architecture and IT security. Mike –