KLC helps city launch new website, stabilize data backup, disaster recovery, manage city documents, and provide email

Incorporated in 1965, Lyndon, Kentucky has grown from 500 to more than 11,000 residents in almost 50 years. The city actively promotes business, ranging from UPS’s International Air Headquarters to smaller businesses numbering more than 500 in this thriving community. With the city’s 17-acre Robsion Park providing playgrounds and trails for its citizens, Lyndon is one of Kentucky’s most progressive cities.

Challenge

Despite phenomenal growth, the city’s technology unfortunately lagged behind. Uncertainty existed related to the city’s data backup, ability to recover in the event of a disaster, email, website, and hardware support. With so many questions unanswered, the city was not well prepared for a system failure.

As with many cities that have underinvested in technology, the potential high cost of upgrading prevented Lyndon city leaders from moving forward.

Solution

Lyndon solved these challenges by using the Kentucky League of Cities “IT in a Box” service. Powered by Sophicity, “IT in a Box” is a complete IT solution for cities and local governments. The service includes a website, data backup, offsite storage, email, document management, Microsoft Office for desktops, server and desktop management, vendor management and a seven-day a week helpdesk.

Results

“IT in a Box” helped Lyndon:

• Reduce service outages by switching to more reliable Internet access.
• Mitigate the risk of data loss through onsite and offsite server backups.
• Ensure a highly available and dependable email system.
• Mitigate the risk of paper document loss and increase document retrieval ability through a document management system.
• Launch a high quality, user-friendly website.
• Replace an expensive, hard-to-maintain phone system with a VoIP system.

From Sophicity’s assessment of the city’s previous IT infrastructure, Lyndon saved $45,508 of the costs typically spent modernizing a city network of their environment and size, with no upfront capital expense. “IT in a Box” helped Lyndon stabilize its technology and create a predictable and affordable IT budget.

We are thrilled with the results Sophicity has been able to provide the City of Lyndon. Our records are now secure and the system is backed up daily to off-site storage. Sophicity assisted with analyzing our telephone/internet needs and they were able to provide a new system which is up, running and working well. And I can’t say enough about their availability, expertise and problem-solving skills. They are our “One Stop Shop!” – Mayor Susan Barto

If you're interested in learning more, contact us about IT in a Box.

Print-friendly version of the Lyndon, Kentucky IT in a Box case study.

About Sophicity

Sophicity is an IT services and consulting company providing technology solutions to city governments and municipal leagues. Among the services Sophicity delivers in “IT in a Box” are a website, data backup, offsite storage, email, document management, Microsoft Office for desktops, server and desktop management, vendor management and a seven-day a week helpdesk. Read more about IT in a Box.

In previous posts, we’ve discussed what citizens and businesses should find on your city website. But what about people who are not citizens? Many cities tend to neglect focusing on non-citizens and either focus on functionality for citizens and businesses or simply focus on business-level economic development initiatives.

But think about it. People are moving to cities every day, and they have choices. Any given metro area may have dozens of cities that people can choose from. Those residents add to your tax revenue and help build your communities. Losing those people means stagnation for your city.

Your website is a key place to woo potential citizens. As long as you have some of the following basics built in, you will be able to compete with other cities to interest people in moving to your city.

1. Craft a genuine, friendly welcome message. If the first thing a person sees on your website is impersonal – like a road construction project or list of RFPs – that can turn them off. What makes your city special? Mention it. Thank a person for visiting. Invite them to explore your website. Every website needs to function like a host at a party. If you don’t welcome someone, they will be turned off and go elsewhere.
2. Show social media activity. In this day and age, social media presence is a sign of vitality. You don’t have to have hundreds of followers or Tweets, but if you have a presence on Facebook, Tweet regularly, and showcase your social media savvy on your website, then that attracts people who are checking out your city. It also allows them to talk to citizens on Facebook and Twitter who have raved and said kind things about your city. This person-to-person exchange is invaluable for marketing your city, and you lose out if you don’t provide this channel.
3. Post news and events. If a city calendar is empty or the last news item is from a year ago, your city does not look attractive. Future residents are looking for energy, economic activity, and a strong community. Make sure you’re posting news that features both business and community success. Update your events calendar and invite groups to post a variety of community-minded content. This kind of public relations pays off and attracts people with interests that may span from festivals to tourism.
4. Showcase a strong, open community. Cities need to show that its elected officials, city management, and community are supportive across a variety of activities. People look for certain signs such as strong school systems, active community leaders, and positive initiatives such as fundraisers, festivals, and arts programs. If you don’t show off such a wide range of community activities, if you only report dry city council minutes, and if you simply provide functional information, future citizens will look at other city websites for signs of a more supportive community.
5. Highlight easy-to-use services. One of the biggest hassles for people moving to a new city is transitioning to a host of new services such as waste disposal, utilities, and tax payments. If your city website fails to mention anything about these services or presents an overly complex services maze, then it suggests that your city will be hard to do business with. Make access to services easy. Key services should be listed right on your homepage. Once people click on these services, the descriptions should be clear, the process easy, and the contact information immediately accessible. This kind of quality makes a great first impression and sets the right tone for people moving to your city.

While these recommendations sound simple on the surface, practicing them is hard but reflective of a positive, vibrant city. Sometimes great cities are not reflecting their vitality on their websites. When people are researching anything today, including what city to move to, they will be using your website as an important source of information. By comparing your website with many other city websites, they will be judging you on a variety of factors. If you are able to solidify the above recommendations, then your city will have the foundation for marketing itself well amid a sea of competition.

If you want to discuss the power of your website in more detail, please contact us.

You know the frustration when your cable or Internet has issues at home. You call support and talk to someone that takes you awkwardly through a script. You may even have trouble understanding them, and they clearly don’t have a clue about your cable or Internet issues. You just want to talk to someone who has experience and expertise, someone who can get right to the heart of your problem.

If this level of home service is frustrating, we wonder why so many cities put up with the same level of business service with their IT support. Part of this is cost. Cities get sold on cheap annual IT support that promises comprehensive 24/7 service, but the service really amounts to helpdesk frustration, wasted time, and an inability to quickly solve problems.

A simple litmus test to evaluate your quality of IT support is to analyze the people who are supposed to help you on a daily basis. Answer the following questions and see if you’re really getting the IT support you need.

1. Can you meet your IT support team? If you’ve only met salespeople, executive management, or high-level lead engineers, ask to meet the people who you talk to when you call the helpdesk. You should be able to meet the people you talk to on the phone by visiting the IT support vendor’s office or their nearby call center. If you only hear excuses and cannot meet them, it’s probably because your helpdesk is staffed out of state or offshored.
2. Who does your IT support vendor send onsite? The same people you talk to on the phone should also be the ones who arrive onsite when there are problems. That’s the best way for your IT support vendor to understand your environment and business. But if the people sent onsite are different from who you talk to on the phone, if they charge extra fees when they spend time with you, or if they send a subcontractor, these are warning signs that you are either getting inferior and/or overly expensive onsite service by people who don’t really know your environment.
3. Have the IT support technicians all received criminal background checks? Especially for cities, criminal background checks are extremely important. If IT support technicians are going to have access to your most sensitive city systems and confidential information, you need to trust them. But so many cities give access to their data and systems to unknown people. If you have no idea who is handling your data out of state or offshore, then your city is at risk.
4. How effectively do your IT support technicians communicate? For us, communication ties into experience. The better trained and the more years that IT support technicians have been working with cities, the easier it will be for them to communicate about your technology issues. If they lack city experience and they don’t know what questions to ask when a complex technology issue occurs, how can they help provide effective support? When considering communication, look for an IT team that “speaks city,” avoids technical jargon, and asks you questions that focus on getting your problems solved.
5. Do the IT support technicians mostly resolve problems? Good IT support technicians tend to resolve problems quickly or escalate them with ease. That’s because experienced IT support vendors know how to resolve most problems. For thorny problems, they know how to leverage their team’s experience and work together to resolve it. But if you’re always calling a helpdesk that awkwardly takes you through a script, never seems to understand even slightly complex technical problems, or always hands you off to another person, then you may be paying for “low cost” support that really isn’t saving you money.

Your IT support technicians should ideally be a phone call or email away. These are people you should get to know, who learn about your IT environment over time, and who generally solve your problems. You need a strong relationship, not a long distance mystery. It’s tempting to purchase cheap IT support, but when your helpdesk is an unknown – where you don’t even know if the staff has received background checks – then you need to reconsider what kind of people are handling your most sensitive data and systems.

To talk about the people behind your IT support in more detail, please contact us.

In Part I and Part II, we looked at both fixing your broken technology and maximizing your existing IT investments. But technology is more than just stabilization and settling for what you have. It’s also about the future, helping you execute your city’s vision.

Many cities often separate vision conversations from technology conversations. If you talk about vision without talking technology, you either create unrealistic expectations or you fail to realize what’s possible. If you talk about technology without talking about vision, you either wallow in tactical planning or make decisions about key city investments that may have nothing to do with overall goals.

In this post, we discuss some of the highest-level and most visionary IT budgeting action items you need to consider.

1. Connect your city’s vision with technology. This means getting your visionaries and IT experts in the same room together. Tick through your vision by department, and list things that you want to accomplish for city hall, finance, public safety, economic development, parks and recreation, etc. It helps to set visionary goals first before becoming limited by technology. For your IT expert, you want someone who has municipal IT experience, believes in the word “yes,” and understands the business side of IT. Ideally, this person should understand what you want and be able to tell you what’s possible immediately or after some research.
2. Create a list of projects with options. Divide up your vision into specific projects that should take place over the next 3-5 years. Your IT expert should be able to assess those projects and offer possibilities and options. For example, you may want an expensive accounting system that fulfills all of your demands, but your IT expert provides an option that has 95% of what you want for 50% of the cost. Or, you may want to connect two buildings but your IT expert says a fiber solution actually has the ability to connect all five of your buildings for the same cost. Until you vet each project, you still don’t know what’s possible and at the best cost for the benefits.
3. Don’t forget any operational goals. When visioning for the next few years, you need to rely on IT to have a conversation about important operational goals. As technologies improve and standards continue to increase, the demands on IT will grow. Are there ways to make accounting, public safety, finance, city hall, or other departments more efficient? Do technologies exist that can help cities accomplish certain tasks better?
4. Think about making citizens happier and more informed. While probably a part of your city’s vision, it’s worth noting separately that citizen services should always be a part of your planning. For example, think about what kinds of information cities need. Explore ways to improve your website, broadcast tools, and social media. Or think about ways to improve the online payment process and offer more citizen services online. Citizens continually demand more information, transparency, and services from cities, and technology can help you keep up with making your taxpayers happy.

While our advice is high level due to the brevity of this post, we really wanted to note that visioning should not be ignored in lieu of focusing on technology stabilization. Cities are able to achieve powerful goals when they connect technology with strategic initiatives, and we often sadly see the signs when that connection has not been made. Once you connect vision with technology, it’s useful to review your plan at least once a year to adjust for scenarios that have changed, projects that have not gone as planned, or new technologies that may have changed what’s possible.

All in all, embrace IT budgeting as an opportunity to enable your overall budgeting. Once you fix your broken technology, begin to truly maximize your IT investments, and connect your vision with technology, your city will make positive leaps forward in ways that you never before imagined.

To talk more about IT budgeting, please contact us.

One of the joys of being immersed in the world of information technology is that we get to see it evolve in front of our very eyes. As people who track technology on a day-to-day basis, we take for granted some of the technology improvements that have changed our lives—and the lives of many people around the world.

It’s interesting that technology is as much of a cultural shift as a technological shift. Despite technology improvements, we are people—people who get used to a certain way of doing things. If you’re not staying up on technology, you might have become set in your ways at a certain time such as the late 1990s, early 2000s, or mid-2000s in term of technology standards.

From a bottom line impact at cities, some advances in technology not only change the way you do your work but can also significantly save you money. Here are five areas of technology that we often find city staff have grown accustomed to, and the “amazing” technologies that need to be adopted instead.

You’re Used To...Hardware For many years, a key aspect of information technology was the amount of your infrastructure. That meant that the more information needs you had, the more servers and desktop computers you would buy. Physical hardware matched your day-to-day operational demands.

Amazing Technology: The Cloud Today, hardware reductions are possible through cloud technology. When your information is stored in the cloud, you access software as if you’re turning on a utility. Instead of having to maintain your own onsite or offsite data center, you simply access the software you need through the cloud. All cities need to explore if their services, software, and information can be cloud accessible in order to get rid of as much hardware as possible.

You’re Used To...Manual Data Backups Tape. External hard drives. Thumb drives. Many cities have people on their staff who have a task on their list every week to take manual data backups somewhere: to a tape library, vault, or other storage facility. These routines have become habit over the past 10-15 years.

Amazing Technology: Automated Data Backup Manual data backup introduces too much risk: loss, theft, or data corruption. With automated data backup, servers can run both onsite and offsite to ensure that your data can be recovered after any disaster. It’s a waste of time for staff to mess around with manual data backup, especially when an onsite server can take hourly snapshots of your data and get you up and running quickly after a server failure.

You’re Used To...Buying Software Whether it’s Microsoft Office or an expensive accounting system, buying and installing software has become another convention that many cities have grown accustomed to over the past 10-15 years. You may have gotten used to purchasing expensive licenses and seeing the software manually installed on your servers and workstations.

Amazing Technology: Pay-by-the-User Cloud Software With cloud software helping reduce costs, many software packages can now be purchased online by the user without buying a server or software licenses. For example, Microsoft Office can now be purchased per user online, with full access and functionality to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Even more sophisticated software such as accounting, document management, and workflow systems are moving to this model. It almost seems too good to be true, but it’s essential to move to this model when possible to save money.

You’re Used To...a Webmaster-Controlled Website Many cities still have old websites run by a technical person who has to code or have a technical understanding in order to update website content. This puts cities in a bind when non-technical staff cannot make simple changes to a website (such as posting an event) and affects keeping city websites updated in a timely fashion.

Amazing Technology: Non-Technical, User-Friendly Website Management Modern websites – even low-cost professional-looking websites – have evolved so that you can make changes with ease. Our information age continues to accelerate, and so you need to update homepage information, events, city council agendas and minutes, and other city news instantly. Your website should allow users to add, edit and delete information, and you can set permissions to make sure only authorized people can make changes.

You’re Used To...Coming to Work to Access Email and Software Many cities still have a 9-5 mindset to accessing work-related information such as email, documents, and software. Servers and desktop computers are onsite, and those machines are the only way people can access work-related information. If people need to access information outside of normal hours, they either have to come into the building or wait until working hours.

Amazing Technology: All of the Above Technologies = Teleworking The technologies listed above (cloud, software, websites, data backup) contribute to a work environment in which people can more easily work from home or a remote location. This has become the norm in most work situations, and that flexibility not only increases morale (e.g. people can work when sick or if they need to take care of their kids) but also improves productivity. If people can check email, access documents, and complete work through remote access, then project delays or lags potentially lessen.

We’ve all had to get used to an amazing array of changes over the last few years. If you had told us 10 years ago that – as an IT vendor – we would be managing hardware-less environments, that we’d access software like turning on electricity, and that users would be adding content to their own websites without our help, we might have laughed at you. But this fantasy is exactly where we are today.

If you find yourself stuck in any of these old habits, you have the opportunity to save a lot of money and significantly improve your city’s productivity. Plus, you’ll find that your staff will thank you. These technologies seem too good to be true, but eventually they will become, yes, a new habit.

Please contact us if you’d like to discuss any of these technologies in more detail.

In our last city IT budgeting post, we discussed how broken technology negatively impacts your bottom line. But even if you fix and stabilize broken technology, the next step is to make sure you are maximizing your IT investments.

Creating sound long-term IT investments helps you from a budget standpoint and also allows you to benefit from the lifecycles of various technologies. Many times, cities do not understand when their technology investments are overkill, unnecessarily expensive, or simply trumped by better, more current technologies.

After spending some time with our Part I assessment, now ask yourself the following questions to see if your IT spend is maximizing every dollar you invest.

• Do I need all of my hardware? With cloud computing, many systems and services previously needing onsite servers are now accessible through the Internet. In many cases, cities can significantly scale down the amount of hardware they have onsite and only spend time and effort maintaining essential servers. In addition, it helps to conduct a hardware inventory to examine if you really need every desktop, laptop, and tablet computer within the city.
• Do I have a hardware lifecycle replacement plan? Cities that plan to replace their hardware after 3-5 years do the best job of maximizing those investments. Hardware becomes slow, obsolete, and unsupported after 3-5 years, and that actually increases maintenance costs and slows productivity. You should decommission and replace servers and workstations according to a lifecycle that makes sense to you, but it should be no more than 5 years.
• Have I evaluated my software lately? When did you originally buy your current software programs? When was the last time you shopped around for a better solution? Just like with hardware, many software programs have become better and cheaper through the cloud. By “subscribing” to software per user, you avoid paying for expensive servers and software licenses.
• Do I have all of my IT support needs covered? Many cities often have minimal IT staff, or even no IT staff at all. They often rely on IT vendors that only show up when a major problem occurs. At a certain point in a city’s evolution, it makes sense to better invest IT dollars into stabilizing the city’s technology and proactively maintaining and supporting it. Proactive maintenance requires a slightly higher investment than reactive IT vendors, but you will see savings in the long-term from not having to pay high billable hours to fix recurring problems that never go away.
• Do I waste time on manual data backup? Manual data backup is expensive, time-consuming, and risky. It costs a lot of money to purchase and store portable media (such as tape), it takes staff time to do the backups and place them in a secure location, and it tends to be risky since it’s irregularly tested and audited. Automated data backup may be a better investment in terms of cost, certainty, and productivity.
• Do I annually evaluate my ISP and telecom services contracts? Even if you’ve kept up on your ISP and telecom services, it still helps to have an independent expert evaluate your contracts and services every year to make sure you are maximizing this investment. A city’s needs change as it grows, technologies evolve, and regulations often impact services. Stay up on this area every year to make sure you are not losing money or spending it foolishly.

When looking at your IT investments long-term, you are evaluating whether or not you are receiving the best services for your city. Examine your IT budget every year with rigor. The commonality through the five questions above is that you need to stay on top of technology so that you are taking advantage of new products and solutions that lower your costs and keep your city’s operations modern and efficient. If you don’t, you’re losing money both directly and indirectly.

In Part III, we’ll look at how your city’s vision, strategy, and special projects connect to your technology budgeting.

In our last online payments post, we discussed firewalls and passwords as two foundational aspects of protecting sensitive online payment data. Next on the list of PCI DSS requirements is the somewhat vague category of “protecting cardholder data.” What does it mean to protect data?

Protecting data really means paying attention. Where does sensitive data come from? Where does it go? Where is it stored? If you cannot account for data during its entire lifecycle, from user entry to deletion, then your data might not be protected.

Here are four things you need to think about as you take a more serious look at data protection.

1. Track your data lifecycle from start to finish. Usually when data is left unprotected, it’s because you might not know where it is stored at a particular point. Track it. Where does data go after a citizen makes an online payment? Is it stored on city servers? A vendor’s servers? In the cloud? Assess how many places this data could reside. You might be protecting your data in one place (such as on a server) when your data might also be stored and unprotected on a desktop computer. And what happens when your data is deleted from a server or workstation? If you are not following information security best practices when erasing data, you may be leaving your data unprotected.
2. Be clear about what data you store and do not store. This is somewhat of an extension of the first point, but we want to emphasize that you need to be clear about what data you store that may be sensitive. For example, you might only store the last four digits of a credit cardholder’s information when sending out a bill, but your online payments vendor may be the one storing the full credit card number. If you store sensitive information, you need to protect it with rigorous best practices. If your vendor is storing your information for you, then you need to ensure that they are adhering to the highest data protection standards.
3. Store and use only data that you need. In many cities, sensitive information is stored that is excessive and never even used. Unprotected social security numbers, credit card numbers, and payment data has been the source of many many data breaches over the years. Usually, it’s because the information did not even need to be stored and kept in the first place. For online payments, assess what information is absolutely essential for you to store and use. Otherwise, don’t capture it. Leverage an online payments vendor to make sure you are not responsible for storing sensitive payment data without staff to maintain and delete it on a regular schedule.
4. Encrypt your data. Usually, a good online payment vendor will build encryption into their services, but it is something you want to make sure is happening throughout the data lifecycle. That means:
   • Encrypting data through a secure website so that citizen data is protected upon entry.
   • Data is encrypted in transit from server to server, whether these servers are yours or a vendor’s.
   • Data is encrypted when stored and backed up, which means that the data is worthless to those who gain access to a particular machine.
   • If desktops, laptops, or mobile devices contain this sensitive payment information, these machines should be encrypted in case of theft.
   • Don’t forget wireless encryption for your city network so that hackers do not access sensitive payment information through an unsecure wireless connection, which is one of the easiest ways to steal data.
5. Back up your sensitive data. As you know with Sophicity, we always like to bring up one of our favorite best practices—data backup and disaster recovery. Part of protecting your data is to make sure it’s still there in case of a server failure or disaster. By following all of the other recommendations above, you will be applying data protection best practices to your backup. Automated data backup through encrypted, protected servers, combined with an offsite disaster recovery strategy, will go a long way toward ensuring sensitive data remains safe and accessible. You could be following all other best practices, but ruining your data protection with unsecure, manual data backup methods such as external hard drives or tape.

Data protection really amounts to having a forest-level overview of your data so that you see it in its entirety, combined with a tree-level awareness of where each piece of data originates, moves to, and resides. Usually, a data breach with sensitive information occurs where you least expect it—a stolen laptop, an unsecure wireless network, or an external backup hard drive. But by ensuring your sensitive online payment data is protected, no matter where it resides, you will have prevented most problems from occurring. Your online payment vendor should also be able to answer most of these questions for you and provide you with guidance about ensuring the highest level data protection.

To talk about data protection in more detail, please contact us.

Budgeting season has arrived for most cities, and information technology is a critical part of a city’s annual spend. Yet, we find that many cities often don’t know where to begin when specifying their IT budget, or even if they should include it at all (other than in a lump sum line item).

We find that it’s important for cities to flesh out a fairly detailed IT budget to help uncover inefficiencies, save money, and better execute business and operational goals. In our multi-part series, we’ll look at how you can use your IT budgeting process to help fix what’s broken, find ways to save money in the long-term, and work to help execute your city’s strategic vision.

How Broken Technology Affects Your Budget

While it might seem like broken technology has little to do with city budgeting, your IT budget can actually reveal how obsolete hardware or underinvestment might be costing you money each year. Bad technology impacts your bottom line every day, and it’s often a hidden source of lost city revenue.

For a great place to begin analyzing your IT budget, ask yourself the following questions about your technology.

• Is my data backup untested and unaudited? When cities use manual data backup (such as tape or external hard drives) that go untested and unaudited, all it takes is one data loss incident to significantly impact a city’s budget. If you cannot recover or use your data for days or weeks, you impact city operations and risk lost revenue. We also find that IT bills skyrocket for cities that use inadequate data backup, especially when a server fails and they cannot recover the data without time-consuming, expensive help.
• Is my hardware more than five years old? Old hardware results in processing delays, server and desktop failure, and lost productivity. While you might feel you’re maximizing an investment by keeping hardware until it dies, hardware gives you significantly diminishing returns after 3-5 years. In fact, aging hardware actually begins to cost you money once it becomes obsolete, ineffective, and unable to meet the demands of city business.
• When did I last think about my ISP or telecom provider? If you’ve used your current providers for many many years, or if you’re locked into a multi-year contract, those are clear signs that you could potentially shop around and lower your ISP/telecom budget. We’ve seen many cities unknowingly suffering from poor yet expensive service, when high quality and cheaper service exists. If you’ve neglected to examine or challenge this line item for many years, it may be ripe for potentially saving you money.
• Are my IT support costs unpredictable and expensive? Many cities use IT vendors or contractors that seem inexpensive on the surface but usually gouge a city’s budget with expensive and unpredictable billing during the year. That’s because these vendors often sell you on a low yearly fee, but the hidden costs arise through reactive incidents billed at high rates. You need to examine if your annual IT support costs are too unpredictable, and if you can save money with a more efficient, predictable model that includes proactive IT support under a low monthly fee.
• Am I paying for expensive software licenses? Another unchallenged area tends to be software. Maybe you bought an accounting system many years ago, or you just renew your Microsoft Office licenses automatically each year. But this may be habit more than budgetary sense. Software has been revolutionized in the past few years by cloud computing. That means that you could potentially get rid of expensive software servers and licenses and instead “subscribe” to software (per user) over the Internet. This software model gets you the same (and sometimes better) software for a much lower cost.

By examining these important questions first, you’ll often find low hanging fruit and ways to slash your IT budget immediately. These reductions can often be significant, even for smaller cities where it might not seem like you’re spending a lot on IT. Whether it’s reexamining telecom contracts or replacing broken hardware, there is plenty of opportunity on a first pass to see if you can both fix your technology issues and save some money in the process.

In our Part II post, we will look more at the long-term investment side of technology, and how you can budget to maximize the money that you’re spending.

Lengthy telecom contracts – those giant documents that mostly go unread – often contain language and conditions that work against your city’s best interests. In most cases, telecom works much like a utility. You purchase it once, become accustomed to its quality of service (good or bad), and rarely think of it again.

When beginning our work with a new city, we usually find old telecom contracts and technical setups that are expensive, low quality, and relying on outdated technology. All this despite new technology existing that works better, faster, and cheaper. For less cost, cities could experience a quantum leap in quality of telecom service.

But where to begin? Here are some common questions to ask when starting to sift through your telecom contracts and services.

1. How long have you had the same service? It’s not uncommon to find cities using the same telecom service without change or challenge for 10-15 years. That’s too long to go without taking a look at alternate solutions and technologies. Telecom services evolve for the better, and those services can often be purchased for significantly lower cost than what you’re paying for your current service. If your city has had the same telecom vendor for more than three years, that’s a red flag.
2. Are you locked into a multi-year contract? If so, this is a major source of concern. You should not be locked into a multi-year contract. Long-term contracts serve the interest of telecom companies, not you. What if the service is low quality or you find a better solution? You will be penalized if you break the contract. And those penalties are expensive. If you’re in a multi-year contract, talk to an objective telecom expert immediately to analyze your situation. (Also be careful of auto-renewal clauses.) Ideally, all contracts you sign should have a 30-day notice of termination built in.
3. Have you mostly seen telecom salespeople, and rarely a telecom support engineer? For many telecom companies, salespeople are incentivized by commissions. When you sign a long-term contract, a salesperson makes commission on all ongoing revenue. Follow the money – that incentivizes the telecom company to sell you the service, not change the product in any way (unless they upsell you), and not rock the boat. In other words, instead of concern about the best, most cost-effective solution for you, telecom companies will usually not contact you if it means threatening their revenue stream. Any consultative, useful, and objective analysis from engineers might potentially lower a saleperson’s commission. If you’ve only seen salespeople, that usually means you do not have a true telecom support advocate.
4. Are you paying your telecom provider for services that you could bring in-house? One common example is when cities pay for monthly site-to-site connectivity to a provider instead of investing in the infrastructure to do it themselves. In some cases, you might also be paying for extra support or bells and whistles that you can handle in-house. Don’t ask the telecom provider about what you could bring in-house! (They will obviously not want you to bring anything in-house that you are currently paying for.) Instead, talk to an objective consultant who is not incentivized by the cost of your telecom services. They will be able to assess what you can bring in-house to lower your telecom bill.

We’ve been amazed that so many cases exist where cities are simply paying too much for inferior technology and poor service. If you haven’t examined your telecom services in a long time, you have the opportunity to save a great deal of money. These situations apply to rural and non-metro cities too, especially with the advent of increased high-speed broadband connections and mobile services. Whether you’re a large metro city or a small rural city, it’s worth taking a critical look at your telecom contracts.

To discuss your telecom contracts in more detail, please contact us.

While more and more government organizations are moving their email to the cloud, backed up by significant examples that it is one of the safest places for your email, we still see many cities clinging to old or obsolete email hosting methods. Unfortunately, hosting your email improperly or through a method that is no longer a best practice can put your city at risk.

Those risks can involve security, compliance, retention, and responsiveness to open records requests. Poor email hosting jeopardizes the safety of your emails and opens your city up to legal troubles—especially if people need to find and retrieve specific emails in response to an official request.

Here are five things to look out for with bad email hosting. If any of these situations applies to you, it is imperative that you begin to consider enterprise cloud email hosting.

1. You’re using free email hosting. You get what you pay for. While free email may seem cost-effective and easy to use, it comes with a host of problems for government organizations. When you have a technical problem, who do you call? Free means little to no support built in to your email services. Free email hosting providers will also not be concerned with strong antispam, giving your city much email storage space, or making sure users can focus on their work without having to see constant advertisements.
2. You don’t know where your email is hosted. We often encounter cities that cannot tell us where their email servers are located. In many cases, especially with cheap email hosting, email servers are located offshore—where compliance and security might be more lax. The IT staff overseeing your data center may not have criminal background checks and yet have access to sensitive city information. And how are your email servers maintained by this IT staff? How rigorously? If you don’t know where your email is hosted, that implies other potential problems.
3. You host your own email servers. While you might be competently hosting your own email servers, you are also paying for the cost of those servers, the software running on those servers, the software licenses, and the staff or vendor that must support those servers. With cities needing to cut costs, you cannot ignore cloud email business models that improve your quality of service while cutting costs. Shop around and explore if you can save money.
4. You’re in danger of permanently losing email if an email server goes down. Especially with laws that dictate retention policies for email, you will be in legal trouble if you lose email because of a server failure. In addition, your staff relies on email as the lifeblood of their work at your city. Losing email is a productivity and operations killer, and if you don’t have a data backup and disaster recovery plan for your email, then you are placing your city at great risk.
5. Your email hosting does not meet security and compliance standards. Email often contains sensitive city information about personnel, legal disputes, public safety, citizens, etc. We’ve found that cities with free email hosting, unknown hosting, or onsite hosting often have major security issues and gaps from poorly configured servers, bad maintenance, or lack of effective setup and support. Cities are held to a much higher standard than most private sector businesses. Taxpayers will find it inexcusable if a city, in trying to cut corners, allowed social security numbers to be exposed through a breach in a free email hosting account. Legal repercussions can also be devastating.

Cloud email hosting from experienced, widely used vendors (e.g. Microsoft) eliminates these problems by offering enterprise level service and support, documented security and compliance policies and procedures, and data backup. And with a lean, scalable model (usually per user) that does not require expensive onsite hardware, software, and licenses, that means you can pay (like a utility) for exactly how much email hosting you need.

Especially on the cyber liability side, considering cloud email hosting becomes less of a “nice to have” service and more of a required service. If you cannot guarantee that you are following essential security and compliance related to your email hosting, then you need to leave it up to experts that regularly host email for many government institutions.

To talk more about email hosting, please contact us.