District plans internet redundancy, server upgrades and stronger in-house tech support

Chris Allworth, director of technology integration, presented the technology department’s mission and priorities at the Feb. 25 workshop, calling for investments to ensure secure, resilient and redundant systems across district facilities.

Allworth said the district’s production virtualization environment is due for replacement this summer and that the department plans to increase server redundancy and disaster-recovery capabilities. He said plans also include upgrading telecommunications and establishing redundant internet connections for each facility so a primary outage would automatically fail over to a backup connection.

On cybersecurity and data backup, Allworth listed multi-factor authentication, DNS and content filtering, endpoint antivirus, firewall upgrades, and off-site backups as areas the budget would maintain or expand. He said the district is shifting more repair and maintenance work in-house, building staff capacity so some software licensing and support costs can be reallocated.

Allworth described a recent, brief internet outage the district experienced as illustrative of the need for redundancy; he said redundancy would make connections seamless for end users when the primary link fails.

Board members were not given specific dollar amounts for each line item in the public workshop presentation; Allworth described the priorities and timing for infrastructure work and noted some cybersecurity details would not be discussed in public for security reasons.