Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the It Communications topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
IT staff urges redundancy after fiber outage knocked village systems offline for 22 hours
Summary
Village IT reported two recent communications outages, including a 22‑hour outage from a highway fire; staff recommended adding alternate Internet paths and redundancy for critical systems, and warned of an upcoming mandatory move of financial software to a cloud model.
Salem Lakes — IT staff updated trustees on recent communications failures and proposed redundancy investments to prevent service disruptions to critical infrastructure, phone systems and operational applications.
IT staff described a recent incident in which damage to fiber infrastructure during a highway fire knocked down the village’s Internet circuit and left satellite buildings without connectivity for about 22 hours. A separate incident in January caused an eight‑hour outage. The outages required staff overtime and manual monitoring of lift stations and other operational systems; IT staff said the village narrowly avoided service interruptions at wastewater lift stations and other critical infrastructure.
Staff said the village operates a mix of dark fiber (building‑to‑building connections) and an Internet circuit from a regional provider. The village has invested in its own fiber and saved about $60,000 relative to previous recurring costs, but staff recommended adding another independent provider path and additional LTE backup solutions to improve resilience. Staff noted that LTE/cellular backup works for some devices but can be slow for heavy enterprise traffic and that radio systems are being phased out in some places while cellular/LTE solutions are increasingly used for lift stations.
IT also reported a recent malware/cyber incident that was isolated and neutralized quickly using new monitoring software, which staff said probably saved hours of remediation and possible downtime. Staff alerted the board that the village’s financial software vendor (BS&A) is planning a cloud‑migration path; staff said that migration will be costly and will likely require a budget request in a future year to procure the cloud‑hosted financial suite and any necessary migration services. The board was informed that TimeClocks Plus rollout and badge‑based swipes will reduce timekeeping errors and staff entry of paper timesheets.
Ending: IT staff will prepare specific redundancy recommendations and cost estimates for next year’s budget, including multi‑path Internet, LTE fallbacks for critical infrastructure and allowances for an eventual financial‑software cloud migration.
