British Government Needs To Lean On Automation To Bolster Cyber Resilience

Uploaded on 2025-04-29 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, GOVERNMENT-National, FREE TO VIEW

The UK public sector spends more than £26 billion a year on technology delivering digital services to millions of citizens every day. And when these resources are deployed effectively, they can deliver outstanding results in areas such as health, education and public services.

And yet, all too often, these successes are achieved “despite the system rather than because of it”. That’s according to the State of Digital Government Review published by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology at the end of January.

The report – published at the same time as the policy paper A Blueprint for Modern Digital Government – addresses critical challenges facing the government, including legacy technology, data interoperability, skills shortages and the integration of AI.

It also emphasises the need for streamlined digital standards, accountability across government systems and long-term investment.

Facing Up To The Realities Of The Ever-Changing IT Landscape

But no review of digital government would be complete without a serious assessment of security. Indeed, both reports emphasise the need to bolster cyber resilience not only to support the UK’s broader digital ambitions but also to ensure both the security and reliability of public services.

“People expect that public services are secure, accurate, trustworthy, and available when they need them,” explained the blueprint. “This needs to remain true even in the face of cyber threats and attacks, and as we begin to use AI more in public service delivery.

“We need to reset our relationship with technology risk, so it’s managed effectively, and to reduce our dependence on decades-old legacy systems whilst bolstering our inadequate cyber defences – all without slowing down the pace of change,” it said.

It’s a big ask. And as the blueprint identifies, it has to be done against a backdrop of institutionalised fragmentation, legacy systems, inconsistent leadership and a skills shortfall, among a list of other issues. Which might help to explain why the public sector is so keen to find a solution to these problems.

One area that is generating interest is Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM), a technology that harnesses the power of AI and machine learning (ML) to tackle the ever-growing risks posed by cybercriminals. It’s built on three core technologies that can either be used independently – or combined – to create powerful, integrated workflows where individuals, teams even whole security operations can enable more and more of their digital estate to maintain its own cyber hygiene to significantly higher standards and policies.

Real-time Cloud Intelligence

For instance, AEM uses real-time intelligence to understand threats, vulnerabilities and updates, track the impact of changes on a global scale and understand the behaviour of users across millions of endpoints such as laptops, servers and mobile devices.

Powered by a scalable, multi-model architecture, AEM is designed to blend different types of analytics and AI models to provide continuously improved rich insights that evolve alongside changes in IT environments and technologies.

At its core, AEM technology is all about automation and orchestration, which simplifies complex tasks to enable IT and security teams to turn their knowledge and standardised ways of working into step-by-step automated tasks. The beauty of this is that it helps to streamline large-scale endpoint changes across intricate networks and dynamically assesses endpoint conditions in real time to enhance accuracy and reliability. This is not only to improve cybersecurity, but also user experience and operational efficiency.

At the same time, automation tools let users create workflows that manage tasks across entire systems without the need for deep programming skills. They can be readily scaled to handle large or complex operations, they can also continuously monitor the IT environment, adapting to changes in real time, which ensures processes stay efficient and accurate.

By aligning large-scale changes with the natural flow of a company’s operations, this technology makes endpoint management simpler and more efficient.

In terms of security, it’s clearly a step up in the fight against cyber criminals. It is more robust and it’s also a more efficient use of resources. And that’s important, especially in an IT environment that is becoming increasingly complex, and IT staff are overwhelmed with providing timely endpoint changes across a growing number of endpoint devices, operating systems and applications.

In a sense, these AI-powered tools are taking automation to a whole new level in terms of scale and sophistication. For example, in addition to advanced threat intelligence that identifies patterns indicative of malicious activity the tool then monitors for this pattern and crucially takes corrective action when required.

Or, to put it another way, AEM provides government agencies and departments with a precise
overview of their IT assets and vulnerabilities, immediately improving their cybersecurity and reducing potential attack surface without burdening IT staff to do so.

And when the UK public sector spends more than £26 billion a year on digital technology, it’s important to get this right.

Dan Jones is Senior Security Advisor, EMEA at Tanium

Image: Ideogram

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