The city’s Department of Information Technology (IT) provides service to some 1,500 employees across the local government.
In the document, the department outlines five main infrastructure or cost-saving focuses, including moving the aging IBM AS/400 and other systems to a more modern, virtualized platform; transitioning servers to either colocation or platform as a service (PaaS); expanding access to Wi-Fi across all city facilities; increasing fiber resiliency to improve reliability and cybersecurity; and addressing the backlog of other modernization opportunities.
IT staff broke down the key projects for the next several years into four categories — critical, desirable, upgrade and maintenance projects. A list of these projects and a brief description of each is available below.
Critical Projects
Data center colocation or lift/shift to cloud: On-premise equipment is becoming more difficult to maintain and power, heating and cooling problems are adding further hindrance to these efforts. City IT staff would like to “lift and shift” to a colocation model or a PaaS solution such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Upgrade to Microsoft G5: IT would like to upgrade from the current Microsoft G3 license to the full suite available through G5, citing improved “security, compliance, monitoring and analytics capabilities.”
Desirable Projects
Infrastructure vulnerability scanner: To meet the state and federal cybersecurity and insurance requirements, the IT Department wants to implement an infrastructure vulnerability scanner.
Extend infrastructure disaster recovery for servers: The IT Department is looking at Microsoft Azure cloud disaster recovery solutions.
High-speed point-to-point wireless connection to remote sites: This project would upgrade high-speed wireless technology to meet the city’s current data transfer needs.
Upgrade bandwidth for remote sites to meet increased customer data demands: Like the previous project, this one centers on upgrading the bandwidth at 30 sites to improve data transfer at remote locations.
Redundancy for remote sites: This project is simply described as “adding redundancy for remote sites.”
Asset management: This project relates to “identification, tracking and protection of critical assets, such as hardware, software, data and intellectual property, to mitigate security risks and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.”
Emergency notification: This project would look at cloud-based notification systems such as Everbridge to notify staff of an emergency.
Upgrade Projects
Fiber infrastructure upgrades: Existing interfloor connectivity speeds are limiting file sharing and general connectivity.
Fiber infrastructure conduit to remote sites: This project focuses on building out conduit to support fiber to Phase 1 and 2 city buildings.
External firewall upgrades: This project relates to upgrading the firewall for the city network.
Phishing-resistant hardware authentication devices: The IT Department is looking at phishing-resistant hardware authentication devices to support multifactor authentication.
Network access control appliance: This project is simply described as “network security between endpoints.”
Maintenance Projects
Remote sites uninterruptible power supply (UPS): This project would seek managed services to replace UPS at 30 remote sites.
Data center UPS replacement: This project focuses on critical UPS replacements to keep tech infrastructure online.
A link to the complete document can be found here.
