Information Technology

Information Technology Organization

 

The IT Department is a small department with a staff of three (IT Director, Deputy IT Director and Network Administrator).  In July 2021, we were pleased to bring on board our new Deputy IT Director, Andre Tamay.  Along with Andre’s vast IT experience in the hospitality business, he also brought new ideas, support and management skills and a toolkit of new technologies to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the IT Department. 

The IT Department provides broad based data and voice services to the general government and schools, as well as services provided to the community via the Town website and other social media platforms.

Data services include but are not limited to network administration, Internet access, website support, system and network security, end-user support, data backups, user hardware (PCs, laptops) and desktop software support and equipment replacement.

Voice services provided include Voice Over IP (VOIP) administration of the entire municipal phone system (including schools), installation, system configuration and deployment, end-user support, telephone replacement and providing a point of contact with the telephone vendor.

Like many IT environments, the Town’s IT department has a back office and front office component to the operations. 

  • Back office – the design, installation, administration and support of the critical foundation on which all IT data and voice services run on, i.e. infrastructure (data, voice networks), networking devices (switches, routers, firewalls), network servers, security services, data backups servers, etc…,
  • Front Office – Town departments and employees and public facing IT services and solutions, i.e. town web site 

For a small IT department to remain nimble and fiscally responsible guardians of the Town’s technology investments and be able to consistently deliver best in class service to internal and external customers the IT Department has utilized the technologies of convergence, wireless services, mobility, cloud services, consultants and third party support, to name a few.    

 The Town IT Department has long embraced the cloud for ease of access, resiliency, security, business continuity, disaster recovery and client services.  The Town IT Department has been providing staff with remote access to authorized users to Town resources, which benefitted us greatly when the pandemic hit and we were able to very quickly transition Town staff and School Administration staff to working remotely.  

 

Vision – 

Continue to pursue our commitment to more cloud based/hosted solutions for ease of access, resiliency, security, business continuity, disaster recovery and improved client services.  We’re also continuing to enhance mobility solutions with keeping the goal of secure access to Town resources from any device, anywhere, anytime in our sights.  

To that effect, the Town has completed and embarked on many cloud based/hosted projects aimed at achieving a more ubiquitous and resilient infrastructure, some of which are listed below -

Recent Accomplishments

  1. Implemented a new Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) so the Town’s critical servers are replicated to an offsite host as hot spars, which can be spun up and working quickly in case of any disaster impacting the Town’s data and voice infrastructure.
  2. Added enhanced desktop protection from malware with the ability to contain and remediate a compromised PC or laptop. 
  3. Internally, the IT department has added a new helpdesk ticketing system, new PC inventory and software deployment system that greatly decreases the time to prep new PCs and laptop.  To take PC support to the next level we’re also evaluating a cloud based PC imaging and deployment solution that’ll allow us to re-image and support PC and laptops remotely, not connected to the Town network.
  4. Increased Internet bandwidth to handle more remote users, access to hosted solutions and the increase in video conferencing and we added a secondary failover Internet circuit for resiliency in case the primary circuit goes down.

 

Ongoing Projects - 

  1. New cloud based/hosted Town Permitting system ready to come online in April 2022
  2. Providing new equipment and mobile systems for video conferencing and looking at enhancements to the large meeting room to accommodate video conferencing. 
  3. Migrate the Town’s on premise Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to a hosted solution.
  4. Cyber Awareness Training 
  5. Migrate Town’s GIS system to a hosted solution