By Aimee Hancock
TROY — The Miami County Commissioners approved multiple technology purchases during its regular meeting Tuesday. The purchases aim to provide additional security features for the county’s virtual landscapes.
At the request of the IT Department, commissioners authorized the purchase of replacement firewalls from MNJ Technologies Direct Inc. for the County Road 25A campus and to bring the existing firewalls back under Cisco SmartNet warranty.
Firewalls are network security devices that monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic and will permit or block data based on a set of security policies. It’s used primarily to prevent unauthorized access to data within Miami County.
This licensing is good for three years, and the cost is not to exceed $30,770.
Commissioners then authorized the purchase from MNJ of Cisco Cloud Email Security, also referred to as anti-spam. This will replace the current anti-spam solution and will allow for extremely granular control with regard to what emails are received into the county’s email system. This security system rapidly detects, quarantines, investigates, and remedies cyber-attacks that target email.
This subscription is a three-year service for 650 users, and the cost is not to exceed $9,750.
According to IT Department Director Adam Emswiler, in his eight years working for Miami County, there have been two instances of the county being “held ransom” via malware encryption. In both instances, files were recovered from back-up and no ransom was paid, Emswiler said.
The third authorization was for the purchase of Corp. Veeam Backup and Replication Solution from Connection, of Merrimack, New Hampshire. This purchase will allow the backup of 110 servers and is a five-year subscription. The total cost is not to exceed $46,322.76.
Authorization was also given for the purchase of additional tape drives and APC by Schneider Electric Smart UPS Solution from SHI in Somerset, New Jersey. By adding this secondary back-up system, back-ups to tape will be reduced in time by almost half and will allow quicker retrieval of data from tapes in the event of a restore. The cost is not to exceed $17,733.55.
