North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced Feb. 4 that Tracy Doaks will become the state’s new secretary of the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) and CIO.

In Washington D.C.’s cybersecurity community (and the entirety of Federal IT), the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program is well known and evolving – a bold and necessary effort to centralize the management of cybersecurity tools, services, and reporting across the entire Federal civilian enterprise. Just four hours down Interstate 95, where CDM is not so well known, the government of North Carolina is making a strong case for state-level adoption of the CDM model to create greater network visibility and strengthen cybersecurity across the state system.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has partnered with Sandy Hook Promise to deliver an application system in which middle and high school students can anonymously report safety threats.

North Carolina is consolidating and optimizing enterprise IT functions across the state. The goal is to achieve economies of scale, gain new analytical capabilities, and deliver unique experiences for state agencies and divisions. 

The North Carolina Department of Transportation announced a deployment of analytics software that is expected to improve customer service and reduce costs across the department. The NCDOT chose to partner with SAS to deploy its SAS Platform, including SAS Viya.

The City of Milwaukee is creating a detailed smart city plan after deploying several smaller Internet of Things initiatives over the last couple of years.

Fayetteville, N.C., is turning to an online app to monitor the performance of the city’s services and programs. TRACStat, a new publicly available application, will report key performance indicators, such as performance data, budget and financial data, and updates for strategic projects across the city. The new app is replacing semiannual printed reports or static documents posted on a website.

The third largest cloud computing company in the world, OVH, will be investing $47 million to establish its first U.S. data center, and North American headquarters, in Fauquier County, Va.

North Carolina legislators seek to limit the public’s access to police video recordings. A law effective Oct. 1 excludes police body and dashboard cameras from the public record. The law allows only people involved in the case to review it–at police discretion. For those not involved in the case, including media, protesters, and activist groups, viewing the footage will require a court order.