County IT vendor access, VPN outages and Wi‑Fi problems prompt commission direction to engage Century

Sam Nassar (speaker 7), a county IT specialist, told the commission the county had lost important VPN access after administrative changes to the main SonicWall security appliance and that the resulting outage affected the police department, senior center and other offices relying on remote access to CIC and network resources.

"Everything started breaking when they jumped county need access back to the router," Sam said, describing how accounts used for VPN access were removed or reconfigured and how remote VPN connections failed as a result. He urged the board to authorize a county‑controlled support login and a local runbook credential the county can issue and revoke as needed.

Commissioners asked staff to press Century (the county’s contracted IT vendor) to restore VPN functionality and discussed creating a county login that Century would manage at the commission’s direction. Sam also recommended buying additional Wi‑Fi access points to reduce instability in the courthouse and suggested the county audit the SonicWall license/feature set to ensure the county is not paying for unused services.

Chair and staff agreed to contact Century, discuss logging and support credentials, and return with options; no final contract change was approved at the meeting, but commissioners expressed urgency to resolve outages that disrupt daily operations.