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Council hears warnings about single‑point backup risk; seeks outside IT review
Summary
Council members raised concerns that the city's current backup setup (Carbonite cloud backups for the server) could be a single point of failure and recommended a deeper outside review of hardware, backups and redundancy; a school‑system IT director offered a contracted inventory and proposal to improve resilience.
Council members discussed the city's IT backups and ransomware posture after staff requested an update from the city’s contractor, ETC. A council member said ETC backs up the server to Carbonite, but warned that approach could be a single point of failure if the server or the city’s DSL were unavailable.
Speakers described the rule of '3‑2‑1' backups (local image, local redundant drive, and cloud) and discussed commercial products (Acronis) that provide incremental images and cyber protection. One council member suggested the city seek a second opinion and proposed contracting with an outside IT director from the school system, who offered to inventory hardware, evaluate backup configurations and prepare a proposal for roughly 20 hours at about $85 an hour.
Several council members recommended getting proposals from more than one vendor, contacting the county about their recovery, and considering both ETC’s services and outside expertise. The city attorney cautioned that some deep technical discussions could be handled outside open session if they involve security vulnerabilities, but said general vendor recommendations are appropriate for public discussion. The council agreed to pursue a deeper review and gather additional information on vendor responsibilities and redundancy options before deciding on further spending.
