The Finance Committee voted to recommend a managed-services agreement with Simple Communications to the full county board and separately approved a countywide backup solution that combines on-site appliances with immutable cloud storage.

Committee members moved the managed-services recommendation to the full board after discussion about payment terms and unit pricing. A motion to recommend the Simple Communications agreement passed (mover: Matt; seconder: Deb). Committee members said they will refine contract language before the county board review in October, including the payment mechanism and per-unit cost estimate.

The committee then considered a backup and disaster-recovery proposal presented by a staff member. The proposal calls for an on-site backup appliance at each county building, a separate appliance for the county GIS system, hourly backups, and cloud replication. The presenter said the cloud copy is immutable and that every backup is checked for file system integrity and bootability. "Every single backup is checked for file system and bootability, so I know every backup is good all the time," the staff member said. "Backups are done every single hour, every day of the week."

Committee members discussed whether the managed-services contract should require payment through the county's standard voucher process rather than automatic ACH or credit-card withdrawal on a fixed day of the month; the presenter acknowledged that language may be updated. The presenter also said the group would continue meeting with staff to produce a better overall cost estimate because the draft contract is written on a per-unit basis.

A motion to approve the backup solution passed (mover: Eric; seconder: Matt). Committee members said the appliance-based approach would allow staff to virtualize county servers in the cloud and restore operations within minutes if a facility were disabled.

Next steps: staff will revise contract payment language and finalize cost estimates before the county board takes up the managed-services agreement in October. The backup deployment plan will be incorporated into the county's monthly technology payment schedule if approved by the full board.