Jackson County, Ga., paid cybercriminals $400,000 to remove ransomware that infected its IT systems. The ransomware, known as Ryuk Ransomware, hit the county on March 1 and impacted multiple county agencies, including the Sheriff’s Office.

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.

Denver is hopping on the app-based voting bandwagon ahead of the 2020 elections.

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.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a report released Friday, pegged the cost of H.R. 1–the For the People Act of 2019–at $2.6 billion over the next five years, with $1.5 billion of that going for states and counties to purchase new voting technology.

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.”

On Wednesday, Philadelphia’s city commissioners approved the purchase of a new voting system that should be in place for the 2020 election cycle. The new system, according to a statement from the state government, has “updated standards for security, auditability, and accessibility.”