In a broad request for proposals (RFP) that is due at the end of March, the city of San Diego seeks technology vendors to offer solutions in areas including a data center modernization, cloud services, cybersecurity and endpoint security. City Chief Information Officer Jonathan Behnke told Techwire that officials hope to get approval from the San Diego City Council and award contracts by the end of 2020.
Behnke declined to place a dollar valuation on the initiative but said it’s likely “the largest IT services RFP that the city has released since 2012.” Officials were then in the process of moving away from the San Diego Data Processing Corp. (SDDPC), the city’s nonprofit technology arm of around 30 years. San Diego issued IT services RFPs to the private sector around 2011-2012, Behnke said. The city formalized dissolution of the SDDPC in 2013. Among the takeaways:
• The city seeks vendors for a data center modernization that will move it off infrastructure that’s nearing end-of-life. San Diego has contracted with Atos since 2012, and currently utilizes a production data center and a dev-test data center in Texas, the CIO said.
“Even if Atos were to win the contract, we’d still have to move it to a new destination because it’s end-of-life hardware,” Behnke said. Some of San Diego’s 380 apps — including financial information, customer records and Web services, according to its Fiscal Year 2020-2024 IT Strategic Plan — could go to its own data center in the city, Behnke said.
San Diego’s FY 2020 budgeted annual expense for data center operations was $12.7 million, per the IT Strategic Plan. Survey work by Gartner on 2018 average IT budgets for state and local government, which the city excerpted in the plan, found that San Diego’s IT budget was 2.54 percent of its overall budget — nearly 1 percentage point lower than the average of 3.4 percent. New contracts at current market rates may change that, Behnke said.
• San Diego also seeks a vendor or vendors to help identify “cloud-ready apps and help us get those out to a cloud,” the CIO said, noting it utilizes software-as-a-service applications and has a “pretty decent-sized Salesforce footprint.” The city, he added, is “really considering a multi-cloud strategy” that could enhance and improve its already diverse deployments. According to the Strategic Plan, the city’s website runs in Amazon Web Services; its Office 365 email utilizes Microsoft Azure cloud; and its Get It Done public-facing app for requests like pothole fills is in the Salesforce Cloud.
Older contracts, Behnke said, were structured in ways that didn’t benefit the city to do a large-scale cloud migration. But with new contracts, he said, San Diego is building in cloud strategy to enable larger-scale migration opportunities.
• The city also seeks modernization in cybersecurity and endpoint security. Behnke declined to offer many details here but said the city will work with proposers to ensure “any modernization we do is done securely” and meets city requirements. San Diego receives more than one cyberattack per second — “increasing threats” that will require “continuous modernization” to properly protect systems and data, according to its IT strategic plan.
Mobile workforce will be a “big initiative” in the city’s next IT strategic plan, as well as continuing to move off paper. San Diego implemented multifactor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) internally a year ago, Behnke said; and as it considers expanding public-facing services, is discussing SSO for the public. An overarching goal, the CIO said, is to “improve the end user experience” while increasing security.
