Which Florida Cities Were Among Digital Cities Winners?

This week, Government Technology* shared its annual list of Digital Cities winners, which included four Florida cities. Today's story will be the first of four, highlighting each city's achievements. Stay tuned to Industry Insider — Florida for the other three cities coming next week.

Kicking off this year's list is North Port which won seventh place within the 75,000-124,999 population category:

For North Port, increasing security and focusing on IT were two of the city’s top priorities, resulting in influential changes to various processes and plans. For example, from a cybersecurity perspective, the city has added two new security-related positions to its workforce along with multiple security tools to safeguard its internal network. A few of these tools include multifactor authentication, a security information and event management tool and an endpoint detection response solution. In addition to these changes, the city’s IT leadership is also working on publishing an IT internal policy, an employee IT policy and an incident response and continuity of operations book. Other efforts to increase the city’s cybersecurity include requiring mandatory security training for all employees, sending out simulated phishing emails to test employees’ awareness and adding a phish alert button in Outlook. By adding these changes, the city’s overall phishing risk score dropped by 3 percent compared to last year.

But what about IT? Some of the changes carried out by officials in the last year include overhauling the city’s mobile device management solution so end users can only download apps required to perform their jobs, creating an e-comment portal for commission meetings for residents to provide feedback on issues from home, and implementing a statistical and analytical solution called NFORS for the city’s fire department to collect data from its records management system to provide detailed fire and EMS analytics. Lastly, the city implemented publicly accessible dashboards to improve data transparency for residents.

*Government Technology is a sister publication of Industry Insider — Florida, and their parent company is e.Republic.