Gila County IT director outlines 24/7 support, cloud migration and security steps

Harry Bartling, Gila County's director of IT, briefed the board on department staffing, operations and security priorities. Bartling said the team is 11 people strong and provides 24/7 support for critical services, including sheriff substations in Payson, Young and Roosevelt. "We do 24 7 support, especially with the sheriff's office," he said.

Bartling described the county's migration of finance systems to cloud hosting and noted plans to move assessors, recorders and treasurer applications to the Tyler cloud so those services receive vendor updates and security features. He also outlined the county's multi-factor authentication rollout, urging employees to use the Duo app, and discussed multiple on-site backups plus cloud backups to ensure recoverability. "I never trust just 1 backup," he said, describing layered backups and cloud redundancy.

On infrastructure, Bartling said the county manages roughly 130'150 servers and has recently moved from a VM vSphere environment to Microsoft Hyper-V; he emphasized staff training and proposed monthly "lunch-and-learn" sessions for departments. Supervisors asked about downtime and the possibility of separate systems for Globe and Payson; Bartling said full separation is possible but costly and that cloud-hosted core applications should reduce inter-site outage risk. The board did not take formal action; staff will continue planned migrations and security work.