I remember just four short years ago when the police department made the (probably-wise) choice to take all responsibility for body cam and car cam footage AWAY from our bumbling IT Department and instead put it on the cloud and in the hands of a responsible third party:
It Sure Looks Like IT Department Incompetence Just Cost The City MORE Money
I don’t think it was a coincidence that they made the change just WEEKS after the IT Department allowed a massive ransomware attack on City computers – resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in wrecked equipment.
Any-hoo, when they were pushing to do this, they told us the costs would be as follows:
“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
I demonstrated at the time how if you go strictly by them numbers, it was an atrocious deal – costing the City MUCH more money. The only reason to do it was to keep the data out of the hands of the bumbling IT Department. OK, maybe that’s the price you pay for incompetence.
That was when the “recurring cost” was $10,620.
But according to the latest City council packet, the recurring cost is NOW $19,365!! [see page 80]
Almost a DOUBLING in four years. For those of you who know the Rule of 72, that’s about 18% per year inflation. In other words, a massive ripoff.
Even if we assume that the monthly $270 cost ($3,240 annual) is rolled into the annual charge, that only brings it to $13,860 – a far cry from $19,365.
So the way I see it, since we are just now four years from when all this was decided initially, we’d currently be in the market for a new $11,000 server that would last until 2028. Instead, we are shelling out about $20,000 PER YEAR for this service instead?
One thing you have to ALWAYS remember when Finley or Ryan Gump Ward or whoever is up there telling you that some software “time saver” costs ONLY X number of dollars, is that the price they tell you will go UP massively every year – because nobody gets ripped off like the government: