Bartholomew County officials on Monday approved two information technology-related annual expenses: one to pay for a software suite used by local public safety agencies and another to be in compliance with state requirements regarding cybersecurity.
The Bartholomew County Commissioners approved an annual maintenance and license renewal with CentralSquare for their public safety suite for $125,797.54. They also entered into an annual service agreement with Cloudflare DNS for $7,980.21.
The agreement with CentralSquare is part of a longstanding, annual mutual agreement between the county, city of Columbus, Columbus Regional Hospital and others that use the suite, according to Bartholomew County IT Director Scott Mayes.
“It includes the entire suite of software related to law enforcement, geomanagement, the 911 center— all of the data integrations that happen between the state services locally,” Mayes told commissioners.
The overall total for CentralSquare next year is $284,465.51, up 5% since the previous annual agreement.
As is the case with severval public safety-related costs, the annual expense is generally split between the county and city, with the city paying 55% of the total.
Columbus Regional Hospital and the Town of Hope Police Department reimburses the county for their licenses at $5,552.22 and $1,135.82 respectively, Mayes added.
The county IT director also mentioned he recently met with City of Columbus IT Director Jim Hartsook and the pair plan to “make an extensive effort at the beginning of next year” to see if any IT services they’re in agreements for can be reduced as a cost-cutting measure.
The agreement with CloudFlare relates to the county’s domain system, and is a result of new requirement mandated by the state.
“The state has put some mandates on cybersecurity protections they expect us to do,” Mayes said. “And they can do that because if you notice the last two pieces of that domain name are ‘in.gov,’ so Bartholomew is a subsidiary of the parent domain.”
Mayes said some of the required state guidelines, while prudent things to do for cybersecurity, overlap with what the county already does.
Mayes described the guidelines as an “unfunded mandate from the state of Indiana.”
Counties and municipalities using the in.gov domain were initially required to enter to agreements with CloudFlare by July 1, but that has since been pushed to the end of this year, Mayes said.
