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County IT accepts $50,000 state cybersecurity grant, approves moving DSS IT position into county IT
Summary
The county Information Technology committee accepted a $50,000 state cybersecurity grant and voted to move a Department of Social Services (DSS) computer operations coordinator position into the county IT staffing pattern under a cooperative agreement that reimburses the county for salary costs.
The Washington County Information Technology committee on Sept. 2025 voted to accept a $50,000 state cybersecurity grant and to change the staffing pattern to move a DSS computer operations coordinator position into county IT.
Committee members approved accepting the state cybersecurity award and forwarding the grant paperwork to finance for processing. The committee also voted to authorize a staffing-pattern change that will move Dan, described in the meeting as the computer operations coordinator, from DSS into the county IT department while keeping his grade and title the same. The county will maintain a cooperative agreement with DSS to reimburse the county for the salary; committee members said there will be no immediate net budget increase from that move and that January would be the likely effective date for the change to match fiscal calendars.
The IT discussion also included updates on a scheduled server refresh and the county’s hybrid cloud strategy. An IT speaker told the committee the county operates a hybrid environment with many applications on-site for legacy compatibility and file storage, while other services run in cloud platforms. The committee heard that on-site file shares are being migrated to SharePoint over time as part of resilience and modernization work.
On cybersecurity, IT staff recommended towns and villages accept a state offer to deploy CrowdStrike endpoint detection and response (EDR) at no direct cost to the municipalities. The county IT speaker said the service is “a full endpoint detection response service” that includes continuous monitoring by the state’s JSOC and the ability to contain infected endpoints. The committee discussed that the EDR is an additional layer and that it should not be viewed as a replacement for a municipality’s existing IT vendor. Committee members asked whether the state offering would remain free; county staff said they expected the program to remain at no cost for participating towns but could not guarantee future terms.
Committee members also reviewed regular ticket activity and a penetration-test alert run earlier in the year; staff said that the pen test showed alerts were working as expected. The committee was briefed that Ryan, an IT staff member, has been working on the CrowdStrike implementation and can assist municipalities with rollout and dashboard configuration.
The staffing change to formally place Dan in IT drew questions about the cooperative agreement mechanics. County staff said the agreement will be revised to reflect the move and to cover two additional IT positions that DSS reimburses; the cooperative agreement runs on a January-to-December fiscal cycle.
Formal committee actions recorded in the meeting included acceptance of the cybersecurity grant and a motion to refer the staffing-pattern change and MOA revisions to the personnel committee and finance for the necessary approvals.
