Keeping New York City’s digital services more secure at massive scale

New York City is the most populous city in the United States and one of the world's cultural, financial, and media capitals. It's a unique place with a huge influx of visitors from all over the world and a melting pot of diversity, home to the headquarters of the United Nations, and countless other world-shaping organizations. But these distinctions also make it a prime target for threat actors, which is why the city has been taking a proactive stance to address that risk.

In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio established New York City Cyber Comand, a centralized organization charged with protecting city systems that deliver critical services that New Yorkers rely on, and helping residents become safer in their digital lives.

To help protect city systems from cyber threats, NYC works tirelessly to ensure systems are designed, built, and operated in a highly secure manner. If any of these systems were compromised and the city’s ability to provide critical services – such as public assistance or healthcare – were impacted, and the consequences could be catastrophic for the most vulnerable New Yorkers.

NYC Cyber Command developed a highly secure, resilient, and scalable cloud infrastructure that helps its cybersecurity experts detect and mitigate threats faster.

In order to support any and all technologies across the New York City government, Cyber Command followed a cloud-first strategy using Google Cloud that builds upon years of designing zero-trust networking. Cyber Command uses an open source platform and provider-agnostic infrastructure as code tool to help ensure the services are delivered reliably and securely, and the civil servants build knowledge and skills that can be used throughout the City's technology enterprise.

New York City is hit by 90 billion cyber events every single week. For a timely response, they have to quickly distill those 90 billion events down to less than 50 or 60. Matt Fraser, CTO. “We couldn’t do that without a lot of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making tools.”

The ability for Cyber Command to get the right information to the right team at the right time is essential for the organization to be most effective at protecting New York City against cyber threats. Every day, Cyber Command parses and analyzes terabytes of data, which will soon turn to petabytes as Cyber Command increases visibility across city agencies.