St. Petersburg, Fla., was named a Smart Gigabit Community by US Ignite, a non-profit organization that helps accelerate the smart city movement. As a Smart Gigabit Community, St. Petersburg will have access to “a low-latency and ultra-fast network with local cloud computing and storage capabilities.”

Lafayette Parish Communication District in Louisiana is moving its 911 service to the cloud. With natural disasters in mind, the Parish has purchased a new cloud-based solution to ensure that its 911 service never goes down.

The U.S. cloud computing economy tripled in size from 2002 to 2017, and added $214 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2017, according to an Internet Association (IA) report released Tuesday.

Columbus State Community College, in Columbus, Ohio, today announced it is going to start a new two-year degree program that will lead students to pursue a career in cloud computing. The program is being developed in partnership with Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) and Amazon Web Services Educate. 

Legislation introduced on Friday by Texas State Senator Jane Nelson seeks to strengthen the state’s push to the cloud, the role of the Chief Data Officer, and the state’s IT modernization efforts.

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) is now offering a cloud computing specialization as part of its Information Systems Technology (IST) associate of applied science degree. The specialization, which was first introduced for the 2018 fall semester, is one of the first cloud computing programs in the nation offered by a community college, according to NOVA.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released SP 1800-4A, a guide on how organizations can secure mobile devices used for work, on Thursday, offering suggested solutions for enterprise mobility management and mobile device management.

The California Community Colleges (CCC) announced an ambitious new project late last month–they will consolidate all of their libraries onto a single state-funded, cloud-based, system-wide Library Services Platform (LSP). All participating colleges are expected to go live with the new LSP by January 2020. The move, according to CCC will “effectively connect all students with the most useful, high-quality resources in a single collection.”

The Texas State Legislature is considering two pieces of legislation that would move the state government out of its two data centers and into the cloud, with the goal of securing sensitive state data and saving taxpayer dollars.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, the city of Houston made it a priority to embrace technology, taking steps to use cloud, share data, and improve resiliency.