Teton County IT leadership described a multi-year technology and cybersecurity plan that begins with a data-center refresh and expands to a cloud and security posture that staff say is necessary to manage rising threats.

IT staff (Greg and Russ) told commissioners the countys central server that supports several departmental functions is near end-of-life and no longer supported by the vendor. Staff outlined three options: buy a replacement on-premises server (estimated roughly in the mid-thirty-thousand-dollar range for the model currently available), lease equipment, or migrate workloads to a cloud-hosted service (staff quoted a higher first-year recurring cost but lower upfront hardware risk). The finance office was asked to weigh a one-time capital buy versus multi-year operating costs for cloud services.

Beyond the hardware, IT warned of growing cybersecurity pressure: staff cited industry reporting that exploitation of software vulnerabilities is now the dominant initial attack vector and that breaches are taking longer to contain. County email accounts have appeared in past data breaches; staff urged improved multi-factor authentication and rollout of a password manager for county accounts. A recurring item is WatchGuard/endpoint management and device-patching tools.

IT staff also presented a low-cost internship arrangement with BYU-Idaho that has supplied penetration testing, scripting and short-term development work. The county has used three part-time interns and estimated the program yields roughly $30,000–$40,000 of value for about $12,000 in wages; staff asked commissioners to increase the intern hourly rate from $10 to $15 per hour to improve recruitment for skilled students.

Commissioners directed IT to provide a clearer 3-year cost comparison of replacement versus cloud migration, to schedule a cyber tabletop exercise, and to return with a proposed plan to roll out stronger authentication and a password manager across county systems.