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County staff say vendor admitted data loss as Columbia County moves email to cloud
Summary
County IT staff told the board that vendor Tyler admitted losing data and will not deliver a promised module, prompting a cloud migration and a compressed timeline before a mid‑August contract cutoff; staff warned email disruption and said the CAD changeover was delayed to July.
County staff told the Columbia County Board of Commissioners on May 18 that a planned migration of public‑safety computer‑aided dispatch (CAD) and county email to cloud services was being delayed after the vendor, Tyler Technologies, disclosed data loss and canceled a promised software module.
The county’s IT representative (speaker 4) said Tyler “admitted that they had lost data” and “that they messed something up really bad and that there was data there that is no longer there.” The staff member added that Tyler had also told counties it would not supply a module the county had been expecting: “oh, p s, there’s this module that we told you we were gonna supply you with. We’re not gonna do that after all.”
Why it matters: the vendor problems forced the county to postpone the CAD changeover and focus on migrating county email from an on‑premises domain (co.columbia.wa.us) to a .gov cloud domain (columbiacountywa.gov) to gain stronger security features. Staff said the CAD cutover is now delayed to the second week of July, and that the county faces a hard contract cutoff the second week of August; that timeline gives roughly 30 days to complete the migration once started.
County staff warned employees and departments to expect disruptions during the transition. The IT staff member said staff may “experience … where your email is a little bit nebulous” during the transfer and asked for patience as mailboxes are migrated and security measures are implemented.
Board members asked whether other county systems (for example, finance or permitting) would be affected; staff said the Tyler issue specifically affected the CAD application and the email migration and that other applications (Incode, DocuPro and New World were mentioned) were not part of this particular failure. The IT representative characterized the vendor behavior as part of a broader pattern where larger companies absorb smaller product lines and then reduce functionality: “They just go around and they swallow up smaller software companies … and then, eventually give you not as good a product as you had with the previous company for even more money.”
What happens next: staff said they will begin the email migration to cloud services and aim to start the CAD cutover in July; no new timeline for restoration of any allegedly lost data was provided in the meeting. The board did not take formal action at this session other than to note the delay and accept the briefing.
Quote: “We’re gonna wait until the second week of July to even start this,” the staff member said, describing the revised schedule after Tyler’s admission of data issues.
Source: Columbia County Board of Commissioners meeting transcript, May 18, 2026. The vendor named in the transcript is Tyler; the county cited a related security incident at Walla Walla Community College as background on recent attacks that motivated faster migration of email services.
