Priest River considers cyber expenses, move to cloud

PRIEST RIVER — In preparation for the Fiscal Year 2021 budget, the city of Priest River hired Exbabylon Information Technology Consultant, Alex Stanton, to perform an audit for cyber expenses within the next three years.

Stanton recommended a cyber budget of roughly $7,500 to council on July 6, which would cover the cost of complete migration from two servers to cloud-based software, additional video storage for the Priest River Police Department and employee cyber defense training.

“As always in the world of technology there is a list as long as your arm for what we can do,” Stanton said. “I think there are some pretty low-hanging fruit options that are in front of us.”

Since December, Exbabylon has been working to conduct and review the city’s audit as well as create a checklist of best practices based on industry standards. The city’s audit was broken into three categories depending on the findings: healthy, cautionary and critical.

Based on this information, Stanton determined the city’s most critical issue is information inefficiency and lack of virtual storage. His long-term solution is to eliminate servers all together and go 100 percent cloud-based by 2022.

“Realistically, if we don’t do it by Fiscal Year 2021 we would be literally midnight hour for 2021, 2022,” Stanton said. “This has to be done by Fiscal Year 2022. We are on borrowed time.”

Rather than paying up to $14,000 for upkeep licensing and data on the hard drive, the city would pay a greater monthly fee. The largest benefit would be more mobility and functionality for the city, as opposed to relying on physical space.

“We have fiber optic internet, we have speed, and this would also give city hall and the police department more agility with where they do their work,” he said.

Priest River Police Department recently made the decision to move away from DVD storage and purchase digital cameras requiring more storage space. $3,500 out of $7,5000 would go toward video storage to eliminate tedious tasks for police officers such as adjusting video resolution daily to save more space for videos and records.

“As we start replacing, especially our dash cams with digital, that’s going to become a bigger and bigger issue,” Stanton said. “Our need for additional storage is kind of knocking at the door.”

Stanton’s strategy is to “lift and shift” critical services such as document management to the serverless environment and do complete full migration for the police department to the cloud by next year.

$1,500 of the $7,500 would then be allocated for cyber security training, which includes simulated fishing to further protect the city’s information.

“We can put a lot of security controls around things, we can create a safety net, but it’s still a safety net and people are still going to fall into it,” Stanton said.

Though this item was listed as his least priority for the city, Stanton told the council understanding the human element would be the city’s best defense moving forward. In addition, there is potential for this program to be fully funded by grants circulating with the Idaho Department of Commerce.

Another $6,500 for a new phone system was mentioned during the meeting, an item that Mayor Jim Martin has already determined essential for next fiscal year. This service in addition to the cloud migration would have a net increase of $300 per monthly service, but would save money in the overall budget.

“I think those for sure are critical this year,” Martin said.

Stanton also mentioned the consideration of wireless improvements in the future, with less urgency.

“It’s kind of just one of those things that is expected that wireless is available for workers today,” he said.