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City of Oxnard CIO outlines cybersecurity and modernization priorities for IT
Summary
Rob Rubin, the City of Oxnard chief information officer, told the mayor and council the department’s top priority is defending city systems from cyberattacks while maintaining operations; he reviewed staffing, device counts, a PC refresh cycle, and several departmental projects to be detailed at the budget review.
Rob Rubin, City of Oxnard chief information officer, briefed the mayor and council on the information-technology department’s staffing, priorities and recent projects, saying the department’s top priority is protecting city systems from cyberattacks while making sure essential services keep running. “Our number 1 by far is defend the city,” Rubin said.
Rubin told elected officials that the IT department supports roughly 1,875 city employees and is organized into three divisions—business engagement, solution delivery, and infrastructure & cybersecurity—with 39 authorized IT positions of which 32 are filled. He described the second strategic priority as organizational alignment: regular meetings with department heads to rank and prioritize projects so limited IT resources match departmental needs.
The business engagement division oversees relationship management, project and portfolio management and business analysis. Rubin described a “force rank” approach to prioritization in which departments identify their top projects and IT aligns resources to those highest priorities. He said the project-management team is the department’s delivery arm, while business analysts gather requirements and work with departments to test and tune changes.
Rubin outlined the solution delivery division as comprising GIS (mapping and asset management), applications development and support, and a newer data management and analytics group intended to turn data into actionable information. He provided inventory and workload figures: the GIS team maintains maps covering about 1,200 miles of roads, handled over 800 service requests last year, supports 676 maps and more than 1,000 unique map layers; the city uses roughly 350 applications and maintains about 450 distinct databases across departments.
On infrastructure, Rubin said the service desk supports about 1,100 end devices and 1,300 mobile devices and that networking is active in 23 city buildings. The city operates more than 300 servers and about 200 network devices, and Rubin said cybersecurity monitoring registers an average of about 25,000 attempted cyber attacks per month, a figure he cited to justify ongoing defensive investments.
Rubin summarized recent accomplishments and ongoing efforts: an infrastructure modernization program to replace unsupported legacy systems, a PC refresh cycle that replaces roughly 20% of city PCs each year on a five‑year cycle, rollout of Microsoft Office to all users, and the establishment of a 24/7 network operations center to monitor server health and anticipate problems before they affect operations.
He also listed several cross-departmental projects: implementing a Peregrine data integration and operations platform with the police department, work with finance on credit-card processing fees, upgrades to police 911 dispatch and records-management systems, a document-management system for the fire department, support for police drone operations, and multiple GIS and database upgrades. Rubin said more detailed line-item information will be reviewed as part of the budget process later in the year.
No formal votes or motions were recorded during the presentation. The CIO’s update closes with next steps to present budget details and project timelines at a future council budget review meeting.
