PSJA ISD board approves cybersecurity pilot awards tied to $1.2M federal pilot grant

PHARR‑SAN JUAN‑ALAMO ISD technology leaders asked the board on Sept. 22 to approve vendor awards under a federally funded cybersecurity pilot; trustees approved the awards after discussion and staff presentation.

The district reported it had been selected for a cybersecurity pilot grant of about $1.2 million to strengthen network defenses across multiple areas: firewall‑as‑a‑service, network access control/identity protection (zero‑trust), security information and event management (SIEM), network traffic analysis, and segmentation to isolate incidents. District IT staff said the solutions are intended to reduce the risk that an intrusion becomes a large‑scale outage of critical systems.

Nut graf: The board’s vote authorizes staff to enter contracts…