Stephenson County IT manager reports network overhaul, rollback of 911 software and phone-system cutover

Stephenson County IT staff briefed the Administration and Legal Affairs Committee on Nov. 5 about a coordinated replacement of aging firewalls across county facilities, an unplanned multi-hour network outage and follow-on work to restore services used by staff and emergency partners.

The IT manager said, “We literally took the courthouse down networking wise,” describing an unexpected five-and-a-half-hour switch that also disrupted IVR and caused several servers to go offline. He said new firewalls required new virtual private network configurations for vendors and employees and that staff spent recent days restoring access for health-department employees and…