In early June, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved $200 million for a three-year pilot program designed to fund libraries and K–12 schools with cybersecurity equipment like firewalls, endpoint protection, authentication mechanisms, and monitoring.

The Schools and Libraries Cybersecurity Pilot Program, passed by a 3-to-2 vote, addresses a sector increasingly targeted by malicious hackers.

“We know that connectivity is essential for education in the 21st century. Technology and high-speed internet access opens doors, and unbounded opportunity for those who have it. Unfortunately, our increasingly digital world also creates opportunities for malicious actors. And like other aspects of the digital divide, this is an issue of equity,” FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez said in a statement during the meeting.

In a study ranging from July 2022–June 2023, the Center for Internet Security’s Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) found that 81% of 402 respondents cited insufficient funding as a cybersecurity concern.

Read more here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Imagine you just left a great meeting with tons of action items and next steps. But when you look back at your meeting notes, it feels like trying to decipher messy hieroglyphics.

That’s where Notion AI steps in. Simply prompt it to “summarize my meeting notes with a list of action items,” and voilà. A line item that would’ve taken 30 minutes becomes a minute-long task.

Notion’s latest guide lays out the unexpected ways its AI function has helped millions of users tackle tedious tasks. Here’s a peek at what you’ll learn:

• the most common and useful ways to use Notion AI every day
• which AI prompts to use for writing, summarizing, and translating
• how AI fits into workflows now and what its role could look like in the future

Download the guide.

In the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, cloud, data, and a high chance of growth are all in the forecast. This year, Google is investing $2 billion in data center and cloud services in Malaysia, and has spent $5 billion in Singapore after completing the expansion of a data center and cloud infrastructure there, Forbes reported.

“The recent investments by hyperscalers and by Akamai signal that the cloud is about to become the ephemeral, flexible, automated, self-healing cloud of the future,” Jay Jenkins, CTO of cloud computing at Akamai Technologies, told IT Brew via Akamai PR strategist Michael Maney in an email.

Akamai launched new edge computing locations this year in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—and already has locations in Singapore, Chennai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Osaka, Jakarta, Sydney, and Melbourne.

“APAC is a big area of continued growth and investment for Google,” Rebecca Wong, Google’s head of APAC cloud communications, also told us in an email. The two Malaysia and Singapore investments “build on our growing regional infrastructure footprint that includes data centers in three countries and cloud regions in 11 cities in APAC,” she said.

Read more here.—AF

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Necessity is the mother of invention, especially when a worldwide pandemic is top of mind and community members are asking questions and demanding answers—and they’re often calling on IT to facilitate that innovation.

That’s why the city of El Paso partnered with Cisco on its El Paso Helps program. The Texas town launched a pandemic pilot program, the Delta Welcome Center, with Cisco assistance in the early days of Covid, City of El Paso Climate and Sustainability Officer Nicole Ferrini told IT Brew at Cisco Live in early June.

“We were faced with this challenge that suddenly we had to shelter in place,” Ferrini said. “Well, how do you do that if you don’t have a place? And you surely cannot go into existing homeless shelters that are not equipped to deal with that kind of a public health crisis.”

Aperture of woe. During the development of El Paso Helps, Ferrini and her team had to make certain requirements clear—notably, that the program had to work as smoothly as possible for the benefit of the community members using it. At one point, Ferrini recalled, she had to put her foot down over Cisco’s default insistence that users download Webex to use the portal. It was a nonstarter, Ferrini said, and she made that clear to the company.

Keep reading here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Protect your business. Keep fake users out of your organization’s data with help from Twilio’s User Authentication Decision Maker’s Guide. Fortify your defenses against fraudulent activity, build better user experiences, and improve conversion. You’ll even get tips on how to choose the right authentication methods for your business.