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City staff says cloud migration underway; firewall install at police station will briefly take systems offline
Summary
City IT staff told the council the city is migrating data to cloud services and will install a new firewall at the police station this Friday; staff warned the work could take several hours and may temporarily disrupt dispatch and other systems.
City staff told the Lancaster City Council on Feb. 11 that the city is moving key systems to cloud-based services and will install a new firewall at the police station this Friday, a step officials said could take dispatch and other systems offline for a few hours.
The staff member responsible for IT told the council the city has moved data onto a Motorola Cloud and plans to bring additional systems — including an Encode and Malltrack migration — onto cloud platforms. "We're installing a new firewall over the police station, that will provide us better security, better limited access to our networks," the staff member said.
The presentation described a phased approach: remaining on-premises servers will act as a bridge and are expected to be retired in 12 to 18 months as more services move to the cloud. The staff member said the city had purchased firewall hardware that had been in transit and that Friday's installation was a timely opportunity to put it into production. "So, what will happen is everything will be down including dispatch, so we're gonna have to... as they're installing them... check, and check the info system," the staff member said, describing on-site testing after the install.
Council members asked clarifying questions about whether cloud services still require local servers for software development and staff replied that software would run on the cloud-hosted servers rather than local hardware. Staff said the cloud provider is responsible for backups and security of hosted data.
The staff member said the migration is intended to reduce the city's need to buy and maintain additional servers and to provide scalable storage via services such as SharePoint as an institutional file store.
The council was given no formal schedule beyond the statement that the firewall install would take place Friday and that staff would bring systems back online and confirm proper operation after the work. The council did not take a formal vote on the IT plan during the meeting.
