More Priority for Security of Digital Systems for Municipalities

All municipalities in the Netherlands will give more priority to the security of their digital systems: more attention, more time and more money. The VNG unanimously adopted the resolution 'Digital Security: core task for municipalities’ on 12 February in its Extraordinary General Meeting.

Digitisation in society continues. In addition to opportunities and possibilities, this also increases the risks surrounding availability, integrity and confidentiality. Recent incidents in Hof van Twente and at the GGD also demonstrate this.

Municipalities bear and feel the responsibility to continuously work towards a safe and resilient digital society for residents, entrepreneurs, chain partners and their own organization. This also protects public administration and democracy.

In concrete terms, municipalities will:

• share incidents more structurally with each other and with other sectors via the Information Security Service (IBD)
• share an annual incident overview with the IBD, so that there is a complete understanding of threats, trends and developments
• update and adopt their digital incident response plan every year
• helping each other with digital incidents and their aftermath
• periodically practicing with cyber incidents to test and increase municipal resilience
• discuss the subject of digital security periodically in the Municipal Executive
• include digital risks in the Integrated Security Plans
• structurally making sufficient budget available for permanent resilience against digital threats (according to the advice of the CyberSecurity Council)

The resolution stems from the 2020-2024 Digital Safety Agenda for municipalities.

More information

Read the resolution Digital Security: core task for municipalities

Read the Agenda Digital Security for municipalities 2020-2024

Read the Information Security Threat Assessment for Dutch municipalities 2021/2022, which describes the main risks for municipalities

Read the interview with Franc Weerwind and Ellen Nauta in VNG Magazine

Watch the animation summarizing the Calendar and resolution: