Discussion:
The city has reached the end of the lifecycle (including maintenance, security patches, and support) of our current business critical server and storage(SAN) infrastructure. City IT staff delayed this 2023 planned project due to a very significant price increase of new equipment in order to investigate a more cost-effective longer-term solution.
Since our last replacement in 2019 the cost to replace the on-site hardware has more than doubled. This increase is due to not only hardware price increases but also with recently added external policies like the CJIS(Criminal Justice Information Systems) separation of data design requirements enforced by the BCA/FBI upon law enforcement agencies.
Due to the $550,000+ quoted on-site full replacement cost, city IT staff is recommending we partner with our local government consortium, LOGIS, with their hosted cloud offering for a majority of our servers. This would leverage a hybrid hosting environment keeping only a few servers local that make sense to host on-premise. These on-premise factors include the cost and speed needed to host the data, such as video surveillance, compared to the cloud. Hybrid hosting environments are a very common design in the IT industry which allows for much more flexibility and resiliency.
The benefits of leveraging LOGIS hosting infrastructure includes:
- The city currently has redundant high-speed fiber connections to LOGIS.
- Increase from 2 current datacenter locations to 3 with automatic failover for additional redundancy.
- Solution meets and exceeds new data segmentation policies for CJIS infrastructure design resolving our
open audit requirement by the BCA and FBI.
- Significantly reduce outage times during any possible Disaster Recovery efforts due to equipment failure,
power failure, fire, or natural disasters.
- Increased network security segmentation of environments for internally and externally accessible applications.
- Host hardware and firmware is upgraded to the latest versions behind the scenes.
- Allows for quick expansion or contraction of data storage as software applications come and go in our
environment paying for only what you need. Lower overall cost.
- Proven hosting track record with many other large local cities that have moved to this hosting model within
the LOGIS consortium.
- Direct VPN access to our servers if a natural disaster or extended power outage within the city of Shakopee
allowing employees to work from any location with an internet connection.
The second option, which we do not recommend due to the cost and benefits listed previously, is just replacing all our current servers with the latest generation of hardware. The cost for this is over $550,000, which is projected to adjust up to an additional 20% in price to accommodate the new CJIS data separation requirements of city and counties police data required by the FBI/BCA for CJIS data(PD). Also, with this option, we would also need to revisit this large server project in only 5 years and will continue to get more expensive as we replace this all again. This option does not give us the ability to save future money by shrinking our current hardware footprint as unneeded data is deleted or removing legacy applications at a later date. LOGIS hosting is a year-to-year commitment and can be pulled back on premise at a later date if needed.
We currently partner with LOGIS for our phone system, wifi, data backups, network support, and many software applications throughout the city including HR and Finance. The city has a long-standing partnership with LOGIS continuing to assist our IT staff to provide the best service possible to all city employees.