City IT director seeks $550,000 for PeopleSoft migration to Oracle Cloud, citing cybersecurity and operational resilience

The city-county chief information officer asked the Administration and Finance Committee to appropriate $550,000 from the ISA fund to migrate the city’s PeopleSoft enterprise resource-planning (ERP) system from on-premises infrastructure to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Colin Hill, chief information officer and director of ISA, told the committee the migration is driven by cybersecurity resilience and operational benefits. He called PeopleSoft the city’s ERP platform used to pay vendors and staff and track administrative records across the enterprise. Hill said the system currently sits in the city’s data center in a hyper-converged environment and that hosting PeopleSoft in a separate cloud tenancy would help the city maintain payroll and vendor payment capability if the primary data center were disabled.

Hill explained the migration will require a procurement to find a qualified partner with experience migrating large public-sector PeopleSoft deployments and said the city is coordinating across the controller’s office, the auditor, treasurer, human resources and purchasing. He said the goal is to complete migration before open enrollment in October, an aggressive target. Hill noted the city conducted a tabletop ransomware exercise about 18 months ago that underscored the importance of isolating critical systems.

Council members who spoke — including Councilor Krista Carlino and another tech-background councilor — supported the security rationale. One councilor observed that, while the cost may feel large, migration expenses are likely cheaper than the cost of responding to a successful ransomware attack.

The committee moved and seconded the request and approved forwarding it to full council.