Douglas County IT outlines cybersecurity posture, Power BI data projects and growing help‑desk demand

Starla Jones, director of information technology for Douglas County, told the commission the IT office covers "security, networking, the wireless infrastructure, our the website for the county software support, maintenance hardware, telephones, printers" and more, and that her office has been working to "use our tools to be more efficient and effective." She said IT has built an in‑house maintenance tracking solution and launched a data warehouse project connected to Power BI dashboards.

Security engineer Ben Aldridge gave metrics from the threat landscape, citing third‑party industry reporting: "In 2018, it was 63 days. And in 2024, it was just 5 days," referring to the average time to exploit a known vulnerability before patching. He said breakout time for adversaries had fallen and that email phishing remains a persistent threat; Aldridge reported about "30 phishing or spam emails that are automatically quarantined each day" plus roughly 30 more daily messages that require manual reporting and remediation.

Aldridge described the county’s vulnerability management and testing practices: weekly and monthly CISA scans of external assets, an annual third‑party penetration test, and adherence to hardening guidance from CISA, CIS and DISA. He also explained recent security tools including a managed detection/response (MDR) endpoint product and a Web Application Firewall (WAF) deployed after a site migration. Aldridge said the WAF logged roughly 150,000 requests over seven days and blocked about 70,000 of them for malicious purposes.

Starla and IT staff said the data warehouse and Power BI work aims to standardize intake, create a single platform for multiple county datasets and provide flexible visualizations. They named ongoing projects pulling data from homelessness services, district court, behavioral health and the district attorney’s office. The county also plans dashboards that could show service‑agreement outcomes and, later, expenditure maps to make it clearer "where their dollars are going," staff said.

Staff reported rising demand: Starla said IT completed about 50 projects last year and project counts continue to grow as the county adds new systems such as the Senior Resource Center. She noted partnerships with the City of Lawrence on fiber and with regional cybersecurity groups, and said IT is monitoring help‑desk ticket volume as it scales project management capacity.

No policy or procurement decisions were announced at the work session; staff described ongoing programs and preparations for further technical tabletop and recovery exercises.