OLYMPIC VALLEY -- Their populations, areas and technology challenges were dramatically different, but IT leaders from among California’s 58 counties found common ground and offered studied advice during a recent summit.
Leaders from Butte to Orange, and from Shasta to Los Angeles counties convened for the 2019 California County Information Services Directors Association Fall Conference this week near Lake Tahoe. And on Tuesday, CIOs and tech leaders from urban and rural counties suggested best practices and discussed the road ahead during a combined session. Among the takeaways:
• Agencies need to do cybersecurity awareness training outside of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which was October. Orange County CIO Joel Golub, the session's co-moderator, said nearly everyone at his agency completed their training last month, with the exception of one small area. Some people there promptly fell victims to a phishing attack that requested donations, Golub said — emphasizing that the incident underscores how important such training is.
Shasta County CIO Thomas Schreiber, the second co-moderator, said his agency utilized Wombat Security Technologies Inc., now Proofpoint Inc., for its security awareness training — but realized it needed still more work in that area after a Department of Homeland Security “phishing” assessment.
“They made it look exactly like a county email. Now, I need to start doing that as well,” Schreiber said of the realistic DHS assessment.
Tammie Weigl, assistant director for the technical infrastructure division at Santa Cruz County, said her jurisdiction has been effective at flagging bad actors through banners added to outside emails. But, she added, many users will hate the strategy when it’s rolled out — and ask that certain senders not be flagged. Santa Cruz County nearly always refuses to remove the banners, she said.
• Prepare for anything and everything ahead of a public safety power shutoff (PSPS), officials agreed. Alameda County Chief Technology Officer Dave Kohn said his agency had generators fail at two radio towers, roughly 24 hours into a recent shutoff.
“I guess one of the things we learned is, even though you may be testing on a regular basis … you have to have some kind of an additional backup plan,” Kohn said.
Jon Henry, deputy director of information technologies at El Dorado County, said short power outages are not uncommon in his area — but a recent longer outage tested the agency by “confusing” domain controllers, some of which were out of sync when they came back online. Staffers needed to manually restart and configure some of the domain controllers.
• Data storage is still costly, more than a decade after the cloud first emerged. As his agency acquires large amounts of data, Art Robison, director of the Information Services Department at Butte County, said it’s looking carefully at what must be kept in the cloud. Henry and Jon Neill, a senior IT specialist in the Internal Services Department at Los Angeles County, pointed out that pulling data out of the cloud and “turning” cloud-hosted items on and off isn’t as easy or inexpensive as it may seem.
“Try spinning up, like, Hadoop clusters (or) HDInsight on (Microsoft) Azure and look what your bill looks like next month,” Neill said.
• A recession could change the IT picture for many agencies, but that may not be happening yet. Sacramento County CIO Rami Zakaria said his agency’s county executive has asked departments to absorb cost increases related to labor, but mainly in an effort to offset other challenges and lawsuits — and agencies are allowed to pass on contractual cost increases.
“The forecast for the next fiscal year is continued growth,” Zakaria said.
Tibi McCann, assistant director of the Information Services Department at Santa Cruz County, said ISD hasn’t been asked to make any cuts — but a bigger worry for the agency as a whole may be the financial impact of retirements, which haven’t yet peaked.
