The Techwire Industry Briefing Tuesday morning featured a presentation from Sacramento County's IT executives. Here's a summary of facts and figures that caught our attention from information provided by county CIO Rami Zakaria and division directors Debbie Nadolna and Steve Baird.
Sacramento County’s Department of Technology budget clocks in at about $35 million a year.
“Debbie spends a lot of money in our department. She’s over infrastructure and a lot of our investments are over infrastructure,” Zakaria said about Nadolna, the IT chief over operations.
The county is responsible for 994 square miles and about 1.5 million people. To that end, the county runs the Public Safety Radio Communications System, which includes about 15,000 radio connections and is the first interoperable system in the state, according to Zakaria.
Next year, the county will upgrade its call infrastructure, including the emergency responder phones, to the tune of $1 million. This includes 26,000 blocks of phone numbers for county services.
Some of those phone numbers were used by the 24-hour service line known as 311. The 311 service worked with 1 million resident concerns over two years.
Over the last five years, the county has automated every system it could, including making 311 available online and through a mobile app, Zakaria said.
That app and all county services are supported by a completely private cloud system, run by the county.
Currently, the system runs 500 megabytes at a time but the 2,000 virtual servers are being updated at two data centers to 1 gigabyte connections. Four petabytes are being stored at any time. Every fiscal year the department spends between $700,000 to $1 million to upgrade the infrastructure.
This infrastructure supports the county’s primary authentication services, the central email system, and all other internal and external interactions.
“The trend where people are just wanting to get something done is changing. And we as technologists, our job is to facilitate that. In our interactions with the department, we always work with them to kind of say, 'Well, what services are you providing and how can we automate it?’” Zakaria said.
All this comes after the consolidation effort that was completed in 2012, saving the county $7.6 million.
Here's a quick visual summary of this data:
Sacramento County IT
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