SANS 2026 Cybersecurity Readiness in Government Survey Insights Is the Public Sector Ready for the Next Cyber Threat?

Government cybersecurity has never operated in a vacuum, and the pressures facing public-sector defenders today make that reality impossible to ignore. Budget cycles move slower than threat actors. Hiring processes struggle to compete with private-sector salaries. Legacy infrastructure predates the cloud architectures now central to mission operations. None of these are new problems, but they are compounding ones, and the gap between what agencies need and what they can consistently deliver is growing harder to close.

The SANS 2026 Cybersecurity Readiness in Government Survey was designed to take an honest measure of where government cybersecurity programs actually stand. Not where policy says they should be, but where practitioners on the ground report they are. The 20 years of direct experience in Department of Defense environments that I bring to this analysis (including roles in network security, cloud defense, and compliance auditing), shape what this report asks and how it interprets answers.