The county’s IT director briefed commissioners on technology operations from March 10 to June 18, including an AT&T outage that interrupted Internet and phone service for several days, and growing storage needs in the county attorney’s office caused by body-worn camera and cell-phone evidence files.

"We ran 268 tickets" in the reporting period, Jason said. He recounted addressing a Microsoft mail license disruption that required moving licenses from a discontinued $4-per-month tier to a $6.50-per-month tier to restore email service. He also described a wide-area AT&T outage on June 2 that left the Independence office unable to print motor-vehicle stickers for four days while AT&T repaired statewide connections.

Jason said the county attorney’s server was rapidly consuming storage because of large cell-phone data dumps and body-cam footage (one cell-phone extract exceeded 800 gigabytes). He said the IT office will pursue a hybrid approach — adding in-house capacity and using lower-cost cloud archival storage for long-term evidence retention — and is consulting other judicial districts and vendors to find a sustainable solution.

On projects, Jason outlined a voice-over-IP phone migration with extensive configuration work under way, a cybersecurity initiative for which he is assembling vendor proposals and expected to present recommendations soon, and a plan to acquire a virtualization-capable server (estimated $5,000–$10,000) for CIP to consolidate functions and reduce hardware purchases. He also described rollout plans for a ticketing system that will let users submit requests directly and enable secure remote-support tools.

Jason said IT is meeting with Esri to evaluate GIS and appraiser workflows and licensing, has upgraded several workstations and reconfigured DNS for the county website, and will return with detailed CIP numbers when ready. Commissioners asked for a work-session discussion on cybersecurity policy changes and for monthly breakdowns on call data and IT incidents as projects move forward.

The board did not vote on procurement at the meeting; items such as the virtual-server CIP, specific cybersecurity contracts and VOIP final pricing will return to future meetings for formal approval.