The Cybersecurity Landscape

Since the opening of Augusta’s Georgia Cyber Center in 2018, the state has become a leader in the cybersecurity sector, hatching dozens of startups and expanding several existing companies.

In the past few years, local cyberattacks have shown the clear and present dangers. Fulton County was recently hit with a Lockbit ransomware attack that shut down phones and delayed water billing. In 2018 the city of Atlanta was hit with a SamSam ransomware attack that led to an estimated $17 million in recovery costs, and the Georgia State Bar was hit with an attack that disrupted operations in 2022.

Last year the University System of Georgia (USG) was hit with a data breach by a ransomware gang, as was Mercer University, and the city of Augusta was hacked by the Russian Blackbyte group. A Savannah health system and the Hall County government were attacked in 2020. An attack on Jackson County’s government led to a $400,000 ransom payment in 2019.

The cybersecurity sector has risen to confront the new activity. In Augusta, Fortune 500 company Leidos expanded last year into the Georgia Cyber Center and is expected to bring 300 jobs, many of which are cybersecurity related, to its second location in the area. Even before the Cyber Center was built, the company, which provides scientific, engineering and information technology services, partnered with Augusta University to develop its Bachelor of Science Cybersecurity Program in 2016. There are now multiple USG and Technical College System of Georgia institutions offering programs and degrees in the field.

In the past few years, local cyberattacks have shown the clear and present dangers.

Georgia has a built-in workforce for the cybersecurity sector, with members of the armed forces leaving 13 military bases and entering the workforce each year. And there is another growth engine in the form of Georgia’s fintech sector. As companies in this field grow, so too does the need for more cybersecurity innovation to accommodate cutting-edge technology associated with valuable data.

This need has led to partnerships such as the TSYS Cybersecurity Center at Columbus State University (CSU). The fintech firms concentrated in Columbus and Atlanta’s “transaction alley” likely factored into CSU’s redesignation through 2028 as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense by the National Security Agency, along with many other institutions in the state, including the U.S. Army Cyber Command Headquarters at Fort Eisenhower.

With a steady stream of graduates emerging from Georgia Tech and other big universities, Atlanta has the biggest cluster of cybersecurity firms, stretching from Alpharetta to Henry County. Some such as Apptega in Atlanta offer network management software platforms with across-the-board services, while others such as Core Security in Roswell offer software with specific company-wide applications.

Some such as BeyondTrust software in Johns Creek provide remote support and other protection services for computing systems and mobile devices. Roswell’s A10 Networks provides a portfolio of security solutions. Other companies having an impact include Presidio and Secureworks.

Georgia currently has over 50 data centers, and that number is growing. Among firms investing in Atlanta’s data market infrastructure are Flexential, DataBank, T5, QTS and Switch. Georgia’s power grid and energy investments have contributed to this emergence in the data field. Google has big data facilities in Atlanta, Suwanee and Douglas County, and Meta has a massive data center campus in Newton County. Bartow and Fayette counties have seen an uptick in data center development.

All that may make it seem like this is a secure industry for the state. But just as Georgia’s potential revamp of film tax credits has put a damper on productions in the Peach State, according to Lee Thomas of the Georgia Film Office, this sector could also be vulnerable to political winds. Some lawmakers worry that if former President Donald Trump is elected to a second term in November, he could convince lawmakers to slash the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s budget, in response to its former director’s efforts to combat misinformation during the 2020 election.

The Georgia Department of Economic Development puts the economic impact of Georgia’s cybersecurity sector at $5 billion annually. But the real pain of such a loss would be the damage from cyberattacks, already estimated to rise annually to $10.5 trillion nationwide by 2025, according to a 2022 McKinsey report. This is no time to reinvent the wheel.

In any case, Georgia will continue to play an outsized role in keeping data safe for the foreseeable future, and it’s important we do all we can to ensure we can meet the need.