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Walker County approves IT upgrades, backup and cloud migration spending
Summary
The commissioners approved a package of IT expenditures and staffing changes: Rapid Recovery license renewal for backup compliance, renewal of VoIP support, Microsoft 365 licensing and approval to begin cloud migration, plus authorization to hire a temporary IT technician.
Walker County Commissioners on June 16 authorized several IT purchases and staffing steps aimed at modernizing the county's technology and bringing core services to the cloud.
Dan, identified in the meeting as IT staff, told the court the county must buy a Rapid Recovery license to comply with vendor license counts and to cover total storage up to 30 terabytes. "To get compliance with the licenses, we need to purchase $23,104.70," Dan said, adding ongoing maintenance would be roughly $700 per year.
The court approved the Rapid Recovery purchase to be paid from IT project funds. Commissioners also authorized renewal of the county's VoIP phone-system license and support not to exceed $59,563.92 from the IT project fund and approved a Microsoft 365 (G3) licensing purchase (quoted at about $54,160.46 for the first year) to start the county's migration to cloud-based email and file services. Dan told the court the Microsoft package would provide 100 GB mailboxes with auto-expanding archives, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and 1 TB OneDrive storage per employee.
Dan also asked approval to go to bid for services to perform the migration from on-premises Exchange and local file storage to Microsoft cloud services; the court authorized staff to proceed. The court approved creating and hiring a temporary IT technician at up to $23 per hour from budgeted salary funds for support during the migration; the temporary appointment was set to end Sept. 30 unless the court approved an extension.
Commissioners stressed the recurring cost implications for the county budget. Dan said several of the purchases are one-time project charges and that ongoing maintenance and licensing will be added to future budget requests. The court approved the IT items by voice vote with funds to be drawn from the IT project account.
