Los Angeles is far along in a migration announced in March to move off its 30-year-old legacy mainframe and contract with the California Department of Technology (CDT) to move operations to the State Data Center in Sacramento. The city is paying the state $10.5 million for three years of service and has the option to renew for another three, per the deal announced March 18. Among the takeaways:
• The end is near. Los Angeles has been migrating off mainframe for more than seven years — and currently, in its work with CDT, only a “limited number of public safety” and classified systems remain to be moved to the state’s data center, Chief Information Officer Ted Ross told Techwire. The city intends to complete the transition by year’s end, Ross said, praising CDT for doing an “excellent job” of making that easy. The pact emphasizes the partners’ respective “strengths and weaknesses” — allowing the city to rely on the state’s investment in mainframe while investing in distributed systems and hybrid cloud; and refreshing its own apps.
The exact nature of the public safety apps that will be renewed wasn’t released, for security reasons, but Ross indicated other areas may involve records management and dispatch. Their replacement will be a “multi-year” process and result in either on-premise or cloud hosting.
• Size and timing matter. A partnership with IBM Security announced Sept. 17, to launch the L.A. Cyber Lab’s (LACL) Threat Intelligence Sharing Platform (TISP) and a mobile app to inhibit phishing, is also an attempt to turn the municipality’s size from target to advantage, Ross said. Through LACL, the city will push out cybersecurity information it receives to businesses, to improve their protection. Partners include City National Bank, Cedars-Sinai and the city of Santa Monica; and an advisory board featuring Riot Games Inc., Sony Pictures and Creative Artists.
The city was recently able to stop and quarantine a zero-day ransomware attack, but it took “something like seven to 10 days for those signatures to appear in anti-virus,” meaning other computers remained exposed for roughly one week, the CIO said. The LACL collaboration, with the ability to share threats in real time, will do more than just create regional awareness of cybercrime.
“We’re hoping to devalue cybercrime. We’re hoping to make it an expensive and difficult venture,” Ross said.
• The goal is to make all partners more secure. This informs the nature of what will be shared — anonymized and verified data, which may represent an improvement for the private sector. After establishing its first interface with City National Bank, Ross said he learned that more than 10 percent of the “indicators of compromise” provided were ones it hadn’t received through private-sector services.
• Los Angeles Blockchain Week, six days of activities around the electronic, transparent ledger technology, began Sunday and the CIO offered some ideas for cities contemplating their own initiatives. First, he said, understand it — and if you don’t understand it, don’t implement. Second, realize blockchain’s ability to add value in one key area: public trust.
“It’s a way in which we can continue to maintain and build public trust, in an era where I think digital trust is eroding,” Ross said.
