The 2022 annual conference was phenomenal. It was great seeing so many veteran and new members. I hope you were able to attend all the sessions, extract information and concepts that you can bring back to your agency. Most importantly take advantage of the networking opportunities that you can leverage to accomplish your goals.

The last year has been focused on returning to normality, while continuing our level of excellence. I leave you in great hands with our incoming leadership. They will certainly carry on the TAGITM tradition of selfless service.

Thank you for all your support and contributions for making TAGITM the go-to organization for Texas government IT professionals. I am honored to have been in your service as President the last year.

William Pham
TAGITM Past-President

Greetings, fellow TAGITM members. As I am writing this, we are inching closer to our much-anticipated Annual Conference. I am looking forward to meeting new friends and seeing old ones (Yes, I’m looking at you, Shane). By the time you will be reading this, the conference will be a pleasant memory and it will be time to start again.

GovTech
The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) is continuing to drive its own efficiencies through shared services.

GovTech
Starting in May, Texas businesses and government entities will no longer contract with companies from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as a preventative measure to protect the state's critical infrastructure.

GovTech
Athens School District will pay hackers $50,000 in cryptocurrency after district servers and data were encrypted. The cyberattack delayed the start of the school year by at least another week.

GovLoop
In the wake of the pandemic, many have agencies discovered that video technology not only made remote work a viable long-term option, but it allowed organizations to expand their customer services in a forward-looking, energized way — akin to what the private sector often provides.

GovLoop
Agencies may not be able to compete with industry on salaries, but they can attract talent by creating an environment developers love.

StateScoop
The Texas Department of Information Resources on Thursday announced it has selected Angelo State University as the site of the first in a planned series of regional security operations centers around the state.

Fiber expansion has been a journey over the past few years in Seguin, Texas. Today, I am proud to proclaim that all but one of the city’s facilities is connected to city owned fiber. The remaining facility, a wastewater treatment plant on the edge of town, will be connected to the ring alongside a lift station via a $200M expansion project that will come online as part of the technology plan for the project. Assuming the effort stays on schedule, in 2025 Seguin will have 32 city facilities in total connected to its fiber ring.

Most IT professionals are familiar with how traditional hard disk drives (HDD) operate. Internally, they look like an old record player with an arm moving across stacks of platters. Logically, data is stored in various locations on these platters creating a virtual scavenger hunt where each piece of data points to where the next piece is located. When data is deleted on an HDD the entry point to the "path" is flagged as available for overwrite. When the space is needed, the old data is replaced by the new data.