Peoria County committee approves move of justice system to cloud-based Tyler SaaS

Peoria County Operations Committee members voted Jan. 28, 2025, to approve a contract with Tyler Technologies to migrate the county'9s Tyler Enterprise Justice System to a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform hosted in Amazon GovCloud.

The contract, as described in committee materials and by a county staff member, covers a projected five-year cost "just over $4,000,000," and the staff member said the migration would result in "an estimated net increase of about 1, 2,200,000 dollars over that 5 years," language that appears in the transcript with unclear punctuation and was not restated in a clarified numeric form during the meeting.

Committee members were told the justice system — originally implemented after a 2012 contract and brought live in November 2013 as the Odyssey system and now known as the Tyler Enterprise Justice System — supports the sheriff's office, jail, juvenile detention center, state's attorney, public defender, the courts, the circuit clerk and probation. The staff member said there are 695 active users of the system, including about 150 non-county users such as attorneys and outside law-enforcement personnel.

Why it matters: staff described the migration as a security and resiliency measure. The presenter said on multiple occasions that the system has grown to 35 on-site servers and contains terabytes of data, and that recovering the full on-site installation after a catastrophic event could take "30 to 60 days." The staff member added the county has backed up data to the Azure government cloud since 2020 but that three large, similar installations that suffered ransomware incidents found it faster to restore from the vendor—s cloud environment and move to SaaS rather than rebuild on-site.

Committee discussion focused on operational impact, data segregation, outside-user access and approvals. Member Blair asked whether outside (non-county) users are charged; the staff member replied "No." A member asked whether data are isolated at the data centers; the staff member said "CJIS requires them to be isolated" and that documentation shows the system meets CJIS requirements. Another committee member asked whether the state's attorney had signed off; the presenter said the state's attorney—s office had been contacted multiple times but that formal contract review remained pending.

The presenter told the committee Tyler announced it will move to cloud-only deployments after the 2025 version of its software, meaning the county will eventually be required to migrate. The presenter also said the county performs a hardware refresh about every five years (the last in 2020) and that the existing on-site contract for the software expires at the end of February, creating a March 1 deadline to complete negotiations or transition timelines.

The committee voted to approve the migration contract; the transcript records the motion passing but does not include a full roll-call tally in the meeting excerpt.

The county staff member said the cloud deployment will be hosted in Amazon GovCloud and described multiple replicated government data centers and redundancy in backups. The presenter also noted the vendor and Amazon teams would handle patching and backups, but county staff would continue to perform testing of upgrades and acceptance testing for new versions.

The committee approved the contract during the meeting; the presenter and several members emphasized the decision was prompted by cybersecurity and recovery-time concerns and by Tyler—s announced move to cloud-only support after 2025. The contract still requires any additional internal approvals noted in the packet, including formal review by the state's attorney—s office, according to the meeting record.

Details from the meeting transcript include: the migration is to be hosted in Amazon GovCloud; county backups have been stored in Azure government cloud since 2020; the system has 695 active users (about 150 outside the county); the system currently runs on 35 servers; a full rebuild after total loss could take 30—60 days; the presenter reported about $10,000,000 invested in the system to date since the original implementation. The transcript includes an imprecise phrasing for the five-year net cost increase that the county did not numerically clarify during the meeting.

Looking ahead, staff said the migration will be coordinated with affected county departments and outside users and that more formal contract documents are being reviewed by county negotiators and will be routed through required offices for signature and approval.