Employees of the Harrisburg Bureau of Information Technology (photo courtesy of the City of Harrisburg)
Harrisburg has completed a critical piece of its years-long IT upgrade, which will help ensure system resiliency and availability.
The Bureau of Information Technology has put new protections in place to defend the city’s data against cyber attacks and allow operations to be maintained if the Martin Luther King Jr. City Government center ever shut down during an emergency, the city said on Monday.
Under an 18-month modernization project that was recently completed, the data center established a connection with another city-owned building, creating a secondary data center.
“Think of it as a wide-open pipe, which allows live data synchronization between two sites,” bureau Deputy Director Nathan Grumbine said. “If anything happens here, a replica copy is on the other site at all times.”
In 2022, Harrisburg began a comprehensive, web-based IT upgrade, along with consultant Tyler Technologies. The project should be completed early next year, at which time all users will transition from an obsolete mainframe system that’s been in place since the 1980s, according to the city.
The new backup technology also features air-gapping, meaning the computers or networks cannot be wirelessly accessed by the outside world, and immutability, meaning files cannot be deleted or edited after being uploaded to the cloud.
Through these updates and improvements, the secondary location would be fully prepared to take over operations immediately, if necessary.
The project also included the removal of several racks of server equipment to make operations more efficient and cut back on power consumption, according to the city.
“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.
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