This Week in Gov Tech

All right, DGIF, we're back for another episode of In Case You Missed It This Week in GovTech. This market continues to be hotter than ever, so much activity that's happening. We're gonna break down some interesting articles and kind of things that caught our attention this week. And then we have tons of new guests lined up for weeks ahead. So we're really excited about that. But let's dive straight in. Joe, I know one of the first things that kind of caught your attention this week was a new job posting. Tell us a little bit about, about this.

Yeah, California's Deputy Chief Technology Innovation Officer posted a job posting for a new role for the state to develop a proof of concept for a digital ID program. Obviously, this is a trend that we've been following for quite some time as states across the country are working on establishing digital identity. This is a great combination between that very important topic, obviously a focus on privacy, and what it sounds like they're going to initially tackle is a statewide approach or an ecosystem for identity across all CA.gov properties. And Very well may see them down the road also work their way into the DMV, but for now, we're going to work across a common identity for all CA properties.

Yeah, I think this is really fascinating. It kind of sticks to our theme of identity being really the next killer app. And as states have looked at ways to kind of unbundle identity and even, you know, using Apple standards, taking identity and making it portable onto your phone, it'll be interesting to see kind of what comes out of this with all the innovations that are happening there. We've also seen on the market side, a lot of companies are looking at tackling identity for state and local government agencies, all the way down to like municipal ID for homeless people and other individuals. So, so a very hot space indeed. All right. So the one that caught my attention this week was around a company that's been on our radar before, Paladin. It was really focused on kind of drone technology and enabling technology for DJI drones originally. They've actually launched their own hardware product with a software component app as a part of it targeting first responders. And so they call it Nighthawk. And so, you know, really interesting kind of approach. And really what they kind of found in this TechCrunch piece is that some of the consumer-oriented hardware that's out there wasn't really applicable for first responder use cases. So they created their own, put thermal imaging on it, you know, better zoom, and then created a software product really optimizing communication for first responders, which can't go down, and kind of the surveying necessary in order to deal with the situation that's at hand. And so I think this is just a larger trend of just what's happening in the public safety vertical within our GovTech market. You know, we saw a ton of applications and kind of SaaS technologies really take off there, a lot of investment flowing to them. Now we're seeing a lot more hardware kind of enter the GovTech space as well, as people are finding ways to bring AI to the edge And they're also finding ways to leverage new emerging technologies like drones to solve very mission-critical use cases.

You know, I sit here in Northern California today where ash is falling from the sky and the fires are burning across the entire West Coast. You look at the applicability of this technology in moments like this, you can see the need for that specialized technology that you just outlined in those moments of crisis.

And then, yeah, I think drones are going to be— oh, sorry. I do agree with Joe that drones are going to be a big part of You know, getting a handle on these wildfires. But Dustin, go back to your earlier point about, you know, these innovations that are happening in the drone space to make them better for people like first responders and such. There was also an announcement recently about Qualcomm coming out with an AI and 5G platform for drones. And so that's just another example of what you're talking about. You know, we've already seen drones explode as far as like how many different agencies are using them. But now we're actually seeing the technology advance while that's happening. And so it's just no telling what we're going to see in the next year in this space.

Yeah, it's wild. And now, you know, with the funds that are being raised, I mean, we're seeing so many institutional investors that are raising dedicated funds now focusing on, you know, the public sector and social good. And, you know, it's just an exciting time to see these innovations start to hit the market. So you had an article that caught your attention about someone hitting the delete button. So tell us a little bit about this one.

Yeah, so I don't know if they actually hit the delete button. I don't know exactly what happened. But I do know from reading this story that the Dallas Police Department has one big problem here. So, you know, I've talked to cybersecurity experts before, and they've always talked about how your employees are your first line of defense against But, you know, the saying goes, sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. And that's what happened here. A member of the Dallas Police Department, when trying to move files from a cloud platform to an on-premise server, ended up deleting 22 terabytes of data. And 8 terabytes of that were actually case files. So in other words, a murder trial right now, a murder case is on hold. And some other things are on hold. And this just goes to show you, you really got to make sure that you have, you know, all of your T's crossed and all of your I's dotted. And so now in response, the department is coming up with some new protocols. Instead of just having one person responsible for doing this sort of thing, it's now going to dedicate 2 people just to make sure no one makes any mistakes. And then the other thing too is that now they're Putting in place where if something does get deleted, it'll automatically go to a recycle bin and it won't be automatically deleted until 14 days later. You know, this may sound like just— well, it does. It sounds like very, very simple controls, but this is something that every agency needs to think about. They have to make sure that they're doing the simple stuff so that this kind of bad stuff doesn't happen.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And it also, you know, kind of to me reiterates the need to kind of prepare that foundation for ransomware attacks. I mean, what happens if someone were to come in and actually encrypt that data where you can't access it and hold it hostage for, you know, a payment in Bitcoin? You have to have data replication, you've got to have backups, you got to have a whole process in place to ensure that if something like that happens, you mitigate your risk of data loss by having at least, you know, some of those basic backup foundations in place or data replications, basic data management. kind of plays here. So I think a lot of the cyberattacks that we've seen have just reiterated the importance of foundational technologies to deal with the loss that happens from a potential incident.

Yeah, the last 15 or so months have given us a new appreciation for resiliency and redundancy and all of those things, as well as responsiveness. So that brings us to a close in this week's episode of In Case You Missed It. Join us next week. Like Dustin said, we're going to have some guests joining us and some exciting news ahead. So Have a wonderful weekend and catch you on the next episode. Take care.

See you next Friday.