Overview

June 29

Today’s headlines are filled with reports of increasingly sophisticated and disruptive cybercrime. Government agencies have become primary targets for ransomware attacks that lock up vital systems and data. A new wave of supply chain exploits presents serious threats to public sector organizations that rely on growing numbers of partners and service providers to perform their missions. And, of course, many state and local jurisdictions face greater cyber risk due to expanded adoption of remote work and digital service delivery, coupled with a greater dependence on their IT infrastructure.

All of this makes security and continuity of operations even bigger priorities for state and local government leaders who need to deliver important services to the public. Join us June 29 at 11am PT/2pm ET, when Government Technology hosts a panel of public- and private-sector experts for a conversation around using Google Workspace – a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools – to protect vital government operations and ensure services remain available when communities need them most.

Important questions all government leaders should ask their service providers around security and disaster recovery
How government agencies are using Google Workspace to strengthen security and continuity of operations
How Google Workspace can be used as a backup for existing email and collaboration tools during an outage or crisis
How agencies can flexibly migrate to a more secure cloud-based communications and collaboration platform

Speakers

Tracia Sherman

Asst. Director Access Management Services, Maryland Department of Information Technology

Tracia Sherman is a Google Administrator and holds a Google Professional Collaboration Engineer Certification. She is the Assistant Director of Access Management Services for the State of Maryland where she has worked for 15 years. Tracia was part of the original team that migrated 52 agencies within the State, which is about 50,000 employees, to the Google platform in 2012 and trained the majority of those users. Tracia strives to deliver to her customers the best coaching, mentoring and support she can to help employees meet their productivity goals using Workspace. Tracia and her team have developed along with Sada, Maryland’s reseller, seven conferences, attended and participated in a few Google Meet-ups and most recently participated in a podcast with Sada. Tracia holds a BS in Business Management from Notre Dame of Maryland University. She enjoys spending time with her family and friends at social functions. Loves to laugh, dance and sing, holds concerts in her car. Avid dog lover and most animals in general. Enjoys playing softball, volleyball, bowling and riding bikes. Favorite sport is football ...Go Ravens!

Carrie Gernant

Google Admin for the State of Wyoming

Carrie has worked for the State of Wyoming for 14 years, and has been a Google Administrator for 9 of those years. Carrie assisted with the migration to Google Workspace in 2011, Wyoming being the first state government to “go Google.” and enjoyed learning about the ins and outs of everything Google Workspace has to offer and was moved from the position as a helpdesk lead to the Lead Google Administrator role. Since 2011 Carrie has seen it all and assisted with all major Google projects for the State of Wyoming including: our Google Workspace RFPs and contracts, the migration off Postini to Google Vault, the introduction and evolution of Chromebox for Meetings, Google Meet, DLP for Gmail and Google Drive, Google Cloud Platform, the list is too extensive to continue on, as are the projects throughout the years. Carrie enjoy working with our resellers and Google representatives, they are a good group of people who strive to help the State of Wyoming save money while getting the most out of the suite of products offered through Google Workspace. When not working with state agencies, supporting Google Workspace for the State, Carrie enjoys working on home improvement projects (small ones), gardening, and a good Netflix binge in the winter months in Wyoming.

Jeff Brown

Global Public Sector, Workspace Manager, Google

Jeff Brown is a Strategic Business Executive for Google's Public Sector team focused on Google Workspace. He has spent the last 9 years with Google working with public sector organizations to understand and adopt cloud technologies. Large scale cloud transitions are paradigm shifts, some of those he is responsible for include the States of: Colorado, Utah, Iowa, Arizona and recently West Virginia which required both political and organizational change. Prior to Google, Jeff spent the last 15 years in the public sector vertical with Symantec, VMWare and CA Technologies and is based out of Denver, CO.

Dan Lohrmann — Moderator

Senior Fellow, Center for Digital Government

Daniel J. Lohrmann is an internationally recognized cybersecurity leader, technologist, keynote speaker and author. He led Michigan government’s cybersecurity and technology infrastructure teams from May 2002 to August 2014, including as enterprise-wide Chief Security Officer (CSO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). During his distinguished career, he has served both the public and private sectors in a variety of executive leadership capacities including advising senior leaders at the White House, National Governors Association (NGA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Throughout his career he has received numerous national awards including: CSO of the Year, Public Official of the Year and Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leader.

Webinar

Continuity of Government: Maintaining Constituent Services and Employee Collaboration in a Crisis