{HARRISBURG} – If an emergency were to ever shut down the City of Harrisburg’s Martin Luther King Jr. City Government Center, city operations would still go on as normal thanks to new and improved protections the Bureau of Information Technology has put in place.
The bureau, under the direction of Director Steve Bortner and Deputy Director Nathan Grumbine, recently completed an 18-month project in modernizing its data center. Aging city technology had been steadily losing support over time. In June, City of Harrisburg IT established a connection to another city-owned building with a high-speed, 10 gigabyte connection which effectively established a secondary data center.
“Think of it as a wide open pipe, which allows live data synchronization between two sites,” Grumbine said. “If anything happens here, a replica copy is on the other site at all times.”
Having all city data constantly updated and stored at a backup location allows city government to continue to be fully functional in the event of an emergency, such as a cyber attack like ransomware, or a weather-related emergency, like a power outage or flood.
In addition, Grumbine added, the new equipment IT purchased as part of its technology upgrade has made the city less vulnerable to cyber attacks. The new backup equipment provides ransomware protection through air-gapping and immunitablity. This modern, top-of-the-line equipment prevents hackers from accessing data on servers remotely, and ensures no one can edit or delete files once they have been uploaded to the cloud.
“The major impact this has is it makes sure we have the ability to keep IT operations up for services to police, fire, and business units throughout Harrisburg, if there is an emergency situation that takes City Hall offline,” Grumbine said.
Along with making city government safer from malicious attacks and unforeseen emergencies, the technology upgrades have also made City Hall more efficient. As part of the upgrade, the Bureau of Information Technology transitioned from 10 racks of server equipment down to one rack, allowing for power consolidation, saving taxpayers on City Hall energy costs.
These are the latest in a long-term strategic plan which started five years ago to make city government technology more modern and efficient. Since the end of 2022, the city has been transitioning into a fully digital and web-based business operations through Munis by Tyler Technologies. The rollout is expected to be complete in early 2025, where all city operations will be fully transitioned from the mainframe it started using in the mid-1980s.
Editor’s Note: The preceding information has no connection to the global CrowdStrike disruptions which took place Friday, July 19. While the City of Harrisburg was temporarily impacted by the Microsoft Windows outage, no data was lost during the event. The Bureau of IT was able to restore system operations in a few hours.
