Month: April 2019

SVRTC members gathered Wednesday, April 17, 2019 at Nottoway High school’s mini auditorium for the last meeting of the 2018-19 year.  Ten divisions were represented (Buckingham, Charlotte, Cumberland, Danville, Franklin City, Hopewell City, Lunenburg, Nottoway, Prince Edward and Sussex).

The main topic for the meeting was securing data presented by guest speakers, Justin Wilkins and Steve Rennard, from Varonis.  Members learned how Varonis can do a risk assessment of a division’s data to identify the data weaknesses, highlight security vulnerabilities and make recommendations. The initial assessments are complimentary and the pricing is based on the number of users.  They discussed several examples of where data was breached and the information became public along with several examples of data being ransomed. For more information about the presentation, please review their slides or contact the company.

Bill Wilson, Senior Technology Engineer for ITTIP and SVRTC, brought a couple technologies for the group to be aware of. One was a nine-dollar wireless camera. The other technology was a set of prism glasses in which you enables you to look forward, but see “down”. The glasses were passed around for members to check out!

Twenty-one Information Technology (IT) professionals from thirteen SVRTC school divisions participated in Learning Tree’s Active Directory training the week of March 25-29, 2019 in South Boston, VA. This training was provided at no cost to the participants by Southern Virginia Regional Technology Consortium (SVRTC) and Longwood’s Institute for Teaching through Technology and Innovative Practices (ITTIP). In the Active Directory training, participants had 5-days of hands-on instruction and practice administering with Active Directory technologies. They learned how to better manage and protect data access and information, simplify deployment and provide more secure access to their division’s data.

The participating school divisions were Brunswick, Cumberland, Charlotte, Danville City, Greensville, Halifax, Henry, Hopewell, Mecklenburg, Nottoway, Patrick, Prince Edward, and Prince George.