Closing The Gap By Enhancing Visibility And Mitigating Risks
Palo Alto Networks, Wednesday, April 1st, 2026
In the race to digitise public services, the UK's digital estate has grown into a vast, borderless ecosystem that manual audits can no longer track. For UK Government departments, local authorities and NHS trusts, it is a sprawling, shifting landscape of cloud workloads, legacy infrastructure, shadow IT and third-party supplier connections.
This complexity creates blind spots that modern threats exploit. Recognising this vulnerability, the UK Government is moving toward a secure-by-design digital infrastructure, with the 2026 Government Cyber Action Plan (GCAP) setting a high bar for resilience. A central theme of the GCAP is the urgent need for the government to have better visibility of cyber security and resilience risk. Fundamentally, organisations cannot secure what they cannot see. As the GCAP explicitly states, the Government will use 'data sources from across the government to truly understand government-wide and departmental cyber risks.'