2014-09-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

Home

within your department, we’ve met with other department heads and you know IT always comes up so I thought it would be great if the group could just talk to you in person and then also it be interesting to get your insight on how the County might have been impacted IT-wise as a result of Hurricane Iselle. Mr. Jacobs: Oh sure absolutely. IT touches everybody so that’s probably why you hear from, our name brought up every time somebody comes and chats with you. One of the things that we’ve been looking at I thought was kind of interesting when I got your note back in March and I replied to it because I been seeing things from a Cost of Government stand point because of the convergence of technologies there are ways that we can save money and one of the things that we just, we just about finished deploying is the new email system for the County and what’s nice about is it’s replacing four independent email servers from various agencies into one. So instead of having to maintain software, hardware and support for four separate systems we’re going down to one. So I mean we’re starting, that’s one example of some of the things that we’re seeing that we can start to do. The technologies really do start to interconnect I mean this a good example we’re making a video conference connection to West Hawai‘i and that’s over the County network. That’s the County fiber network that spans from all the way from Pāhoa is the far end and it goes north Hāmākua and all the way down to Ka‘ū. So we have connectivity along that route and so we are seeing more and more things starting to communicate so it’s very nice that we can have these kind of meetings without having people drive all that way. See what else I had here. Were there any specific, I mean you wanted to know if there’s, what kind of impacts we may have had from Hurricane Iselle. Ms. Kierkiewicz: Sure. Mr. Jacobs: It was minor from our point of view. We did, because of the power fluctuations, lose about four or five network switches around the County network. They were older switches so they couldn’t handle the power fluctuations and we had to replace those. But beyond that we did don’t lose connectivity other than we had one failure in Waimea that kept us down for like a day to communicate to East Hawai‘i and we are looking in trying to put a redundant connection to prevent that in the future because we (are) realizing the importance of communications particularly in an event like that. So what we’re doing is we’re getting ready to stand up another separate internet connection in West Hawai‘i that will be able to make a secure connection across the internet from the East side of the island to the West side of the island and in case we lose that fiber connectivity. So that’s one of the things we’re trying to do to keep that going on because we have a East Hawai‘i Civil Defense location and a West Hawai‘i one and they communicate on a regular basis during an event like that and they use a lot of videoconferencing so it is important to try keep that running. So we’re looking to do that as well that way people wouldn’t have to travel between the two places. Other things that you know that we’re starting to see that we also, because we share that network a lot of the different agencies are all on the same network and we’re looking at consolidating the support and maintenance of that network so that we don’t get duplication of effort in terms of keeping that network operational and I think more robust in terms of if there’s one place you can go to troubleshoot it, you’ll be able to get a response quicker for it. So that’s one of the you know what we’re looking at from that another way of converging the technologies. 2