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 third-party vendors.

The update emphasized both short-term disruption and a planned longer-term effort. The manager said the current configuration “works” but acknowledged it was not the most efficient architecture because multiple vendors over the years had implemented differing firewall and routing approaches. He said the county is seeking a single, larger firewall appliance to consolidate courthouse traffic.

On public-safety software, the manager said recent work on the Central Square 911 program had to be reversed after the partner vendor’s install created compatibility problems. “The version that they had us install … is causing it not to work properly,” he said, and added the county was reverting to a prior version and coordinating a fast follow-up with its integrator to meet an upcoming deadline.

The manager also described related facilities and telephony work: new public 85-inch and smaller display panels were installed in the courthouse and boardroom (one smaller panel arrived damaged and was replaced via vendor credit), the county will cut over to a new phone system in the near term, and the nursing center’s network was separated so the center will manage its own contract and billing.

Committee members asked for cost and reliability details. When asked about the 85-inch panel cost, the manager said the replacement was covered by the vendor. The manager described the network fixes as stable and said the county is “much better off than what we were last week” after the firewall swap.

Why it matters: the county’s network and 911 systems support daily operations and emergency dispatch. The rollback of a recently installed 911 program component and the multi-hour outage illustrate the technical risk and staff time involved in modernizing legacy IT systems.

What’s next: the county plans a phone-system cutover (no public date provided), further consolidation of firewall infrastructure and coordination with external integrators to complete the Central Square 911 rollout.