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St. Tammany Parish completes Munis cloud migration, upgrades cybersecurity and server strategy
Summary
Parish technology staff told the infrastructure committee they migrated Munis and Office services to cloud hosting, adopted a server lease model, bolstered cybersecurity, established a 10‑gig backbone and set up mirrored backups at the parish Emergency Operations Center; the technology director announced his departure.
Parish technology staff reported that the county's financial/operations system (Munis/Munisys) and core IT services have been migrated to cloud hosting, that the parish adopted a hardware‑as‑a‑service server lease and that cybersecurity, backups and a new 10‑gig backbone are in place to support operations across parish buildings.
Grant, the parish technology director, said the move to a cloud code model offloads hosting and upgrades to Munisys and reduces the parish's need to maintain 15 virtual servers on site: "We're now hosted inside of Munisys. They handle upgrades. They handle all of the uptime." He said the cloud model carries a premium but provides redundancy, managed backups and concentrates parish staff time on configuration and workflows rather than server maintenance.
Grant showed directors' dashboards and a work‑orders dashboard intended to improve transparency and tracking for departments. He said the parish needs to re‑evaluate internal workflows to remove unnecessary approval stops and to define the data and drilldowns each director wants displayed.
On infrastructure and cost, Grant said the parish signed a server lease deal with an estimated total cost of about $1.4 million that covers two server rooms and virtualization licensing; he projected a net savings of roughly $2.3 million over five years compared with previous replacement and licensing costs.
Cybersecurity practices were described as modeled on Department of Defense processes: weekly vulnerability scans, intrusion monitoring, next‑generation antivirus behavior detection, and a mitigation plan with tracked close dates. Grant said the parish completed a migration to Microsoft 365 (Office 365) in October and moved to cloud backups with the ability to spin up virtual servers within a short recovery window. He also said the parish now runs a parish‑wide 10‑gig backbone supporting surveillance systems and that backups are mirrored to a secondary site at the Emergency Operations Center in downtown Covington.
During the meeting Grant read a prepared statement thanking the administration and staff and said it had been an honor to serve as technology director for about 4½ years as he prepares to depart.
The presentation did not result in any formal action because the meeting began without a quorum. Committee members praised the upgrades and said they will work to transition knowledge and find a successor to maintain continuity.
