The latest issue of the Dispatch had another interesting nugget jammed into the end of an unrelated article yesterday. Apparently the police department will be using a cloud-based storage system from now on, instead of using their own servers, which they have been doing up til now. From MY reading of this deal, it makes ZERO financial sense. From the Dispatch article:
“The council voted unanimously to purchase a cloud-based video storage system for the police department. The police department’s existing video storage server is starting to fail, Montgomery said. He added that if the city bought a new physical server instead of using the cloud-based system, the new server would last only about four years.
The cloud-based system will keep data secure, allow for backups and make video-related work more efficient, Montgomery and Information Technology Director Monica Wright said.
The initial cost of the cloud-based storage system is $7,000. In addition, the per-month storage cost – based on the amount of total data the police department stores now – will be about $270, Montgomery said. Recurring annual costs – including software updates and support — will be $10,620.”
A quick look at the math tells me this is an ATROCIOUS deal, financially. The only possible motivation I can think of for this is that the August 16th ransomware attack made them realize just how incompetent our IT Department is and they are now paying up BIGLY to take this out of Monica’s hands and give it to someone who IS competent. I can gather this by how Montgomery points out the benefits of ‘keeping data secure and having backups‘ – which implies we do NOT currently have those assurances under Monica.
Servers cost about $11,000 and are SUPPOSEDLY good for only four years (this is nonsense, but I’ll run with it). So we divide the $11,000 by 4 years and we get a cost of about $2,750 per year set aside for server purchases. That is the CURRENT arrangement – buy a new $10,725 server every four years.
The NEW (financially retarded) deal is this: the City immediately gets bent over for $7,000 as the ‘initial cost’ (for what??). THEN, the City pays $270 a month ($3,240 per year) for data storage. THEN the City gets bent over AGAIN for $10,620 in recurring costs for support EVERY YEAR!!
So we go from $2,750 per year in the current arrangement to $13,860 PER YEAR with the new arrangement! Oh, and toss in a $7,000 ‘initial cost’ on top of it all!! This ‘new arrangement’ will cost the City almost $120,000 over the next 10 years. THAT is yet another REAL cost of having an incompetent IT Department who cannot be trusted to keep data secure.
This most bizarre part of this decision? The City JUST SPENT $10,725 on a NEW PD SERVER earlier this year – Feb 26th, 2019!!! [page 37].
So if we JUST SPENT $10,725 on a new server, then how is it “starting to fail,” as we are told in the article? It’s brand new. And how does a server “start” to fail? It either works or it doesn’t, right?
No, here’s what I think REALLY happened – and this is my OPINION, not fact. It is the only explanation that makes sense to me:
- PD purchased that server in Feb for $10,725 just like they have been doing all along.
- The August 16th ransomware attack happens and the police servers get frozen out (we KNOW this happened).
- I’m guessing the PD servers were either ruined like the water department servers and City hall servers, or had to be rebuilt/recovered at a huge cost of time and hassle.
- Somebody with a brain realizes Monica should not be trusted with important stuff like the police servers. When Monica ruins City Hall equipment, it can be swept under the rug by a pliable City Manager…but if police servers get bungled, very bad things can happen. Like gigantic lawsuits.
- The City is in a pickle because they LITERALLY just purchased a new server 8 months ago. They have to gin up this b.s. about the server ‘starting to fail’
- The Seven Goldfish cannot be THAT bad at math. I just refuse to believe they are THAT incompetent. I presume they are tacitly making a trade and paying an extra $11,000 every year for eternity in exchange for keeping an incompetent IT staff away from the important stuff.
All of this begs the question YET AGAIN: why do we need these two IT clowns in the first place? Why not just outsource ALL of the IT stuff and chop the city payroll by about $200,000 per year? We already have TSM on the payroll for $20k to $30k per year for general ‘network support‘ ….we have Tyler Technologies on the payroll for $44,000 per year…and now WatchGuard will be in charge of the police department IT for at least another $14,000 per year.
If buying a new server every 4-5 years is such a BAD idea and putting stuff on the cloud is such a GOOD idea, then why have we been buying servers all these years? Why didn’t we make this move 12 years ago? Why NOW? I know my guess: a disastrous ransomware attack in August of this year woke up the City to how clueless our IT Department really is.