St. Tammany IT director outlines Munis cloud migration, cybersecurity and server lease savings

St. Tammany Parish’s technology director told the Infrastructure Committee that the parish has completed key steps of a multi-year Munis and IT modernization effort, moving core systems to a cloud-hosted model and adopting new cybersecurity and backup practices.

Grant said the parish migrated from on-premises servers to a vendor-hosted Munis cloud environment that offloads hosting, upgrades and uptime responsibilities to the vendor. He said the parish removed about 15 virtual servers from its on-prem environment and moved to configurable, vendor-hosted services that reduce capital replacement burdens but carry a premium hosting cost.

Officials asked about dashboards and operational metrics. Grant showed default dashboards (work orders and director views) and said the next work is redesigning workflows to remove redundant approval steps and to identify the right stop-points for requisitions. He said the parish will map desired drilldowns so developers can populate department-specific views.

On procurement and hardware, Grant described a server hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) deal and virtualization licensing under Dell that he said cost about $1.4 million (total) and will save an estimated $2.3 million over five years through lower replacement and licensing costs and by providing flexible capacity.

Grant described cybersecurity upgrades modeled on Department of Defense practices: weekly vulnerability scans, mitigation plans with target close dates, network intrusion monitoring, next-generation behavior-based antivirus, internal firewalls to detect lateral movement, and cloud-based backups with a secondary mirrored location at the Emergency Operations Center to enable fast failover. The parish also completed an Office 365 cloud migration and is tracking project status in a project-management tool.

Grant highlighted other IT advances: consolidation of laptop models to simplify support, a GIS team that received recognition for mapping and data organization, and an expanded parish surveillance system tied to the new backbone. He also said some department teams found the project-management tool did not meet their needs and that procurement/engineering had evaluated it differently.

Grant concluded with personal remarks about his 4½ years as technology director and received council members’ thanks for his service. The meeting adjourned by unanimous consent; no formal votes were recorded because a quorum was not present.