The Packet
Operational perspectives for cities, towns, and public agencies
The Busiest Times of Year Are When Local Governments Make Their Most Expensive Security Mistakes
Most cybersecurity conversations focus on obvious threats. Ransomware. Phishing emails. Compromised accounts. Malicious links. What often gets overlooked is that many of the most damaging incidents do not happen because an organization completely ignored security....
Defensible Cyber Program – Why Local Government Needs One
A defensible cyber program helps local governments prove recovery readiness, access control, vendor oversight, incident ownership, and security governance.
Backups Are Not Recovery
Most organizations feel a sense of relief when they hear: “We have backups.” It sounds like the problem is solved. If something goes wrong, the data can be restored and everything goes back to normal. But in the real world, that is rarely how it plays out. Backups...
Your Vendors Are Part of Your IT Risk
Why third-party systems and software providers can disrupt operations faster than most leaders expect Most teams rely on vendors more than they realize. When those systems are working, no one thinks about them. When they are not, things slow down or stop...
When Systems Go Down, It’s No Longer an IT Problem, It’s a Leadership Problem
Why a Municipal IT Outage Is Now a Leadership Issue Most municipal leaders don’t spend their day thinking about servers, Microsoft 365, or cybersecurity software. But when systems go down, the problem doesn’t stay in the IT department. It becomes: A payroll problem. A...
Copilot Is Revealing the Microsoft 365 Permission Problems You Already Have
Copilot Is Revealing the Microsoft 365 Permission Problems You Already Have One of the biggest surprises about Microsoft Copilot is not what it can do. The bigger surprise is what it can already see. Microsoft Copilot is no longer something organizations are only...
When Local Government Systems Go Down: IT Resilience for Illinois Municipalities
There is a specific kind of silence inside a village hall or township office when a critical system stops responding. Not the normal quiet. The bad quiet. Someone refreshes the screen. Someone else tries to log in. Then someone says, “Is the system down?” Maybe it’s...