In this episode, Nathan Sirois from Balsam Technologies talks about managed IT for Massachusetts municipal government offices. He explains how towns can coordinate technology across departments, protect resident information, manage vendors, budget for improvements, and plan for continuity.
John Maher: Hi, I’m John Maher. I’m here today with Nathan Sirois, support engineer at Balsam Technologies, a managed IT services company based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, offering cybersecurity, IT infrastructure, network support, cloud migrations, data backup, and more. Today we’re talking about managed IT for Massachusetts municipal government offices. Welcome, Nathan.
Nathan Sirois: Hey, thanks for having me, John.
Municipal IT Across Multiple Town Departments
John: Absolutely. Nathan, a municipal government might include the town clerk office, a finance department, an assessor, permitting offices, public works, libraries, public safety departments, lots of different departments in a town government. How does supporting so many different functions make municipal IT more complicated than IT for your typical small to medium business?
Nathan: It’s actually really interesting working with municipal governments and getting the opportunity to work in so many different regions. For a lot of smaller managed service providers and more reactive companies, it can be intimidating, because you’re essentially working for one large conglomerate organization that operates in multiple sectors.
And knowing how to figure that out is something that we definitely pride ourselves in at Balsam Technologies, figuring out both the areas where your entire municipal system has to have some amount of standardization, but then understanding what each individual department needs for their specific IT requirements.
With police and fire, things like CGIS compliance, high availability, and making sure that they have 24/7 support at all times is extremely essential to any company that’s going to be supporting them. Whereas your town assessor’s office might be more concerned with data backups, and the records that they’re keeping probably don’t require 24/7 support since it would be mainly a job that’s worked during normal business hours.
But understanding a municipal system as a whole and knowing how to incorporate yourself as a managed service provider into one sector, or all of them, is really important for a company like us at Balsam Technologies. And for any municipal organization, understanding whether you have one managed service provider assisting you, or multiple, figuring out how all of those organizations tie into one another and can work as one uniform system is essential for your local government to operate efficiently and effectively.
Protecting Resident Information and Public Records
John: Okay. How can municipalities protect resident information like financial data and public records while still making government offices accessible to employees and the public?
Nathan: Most of these issues are normally solved through specific auditing practices and making sure that you have all of your systems thoroughly secured. A lot of municipal organizations can fall into the trap of just having the basic cybersecurity practices in place, not having comprehensive auditing done.
And then when larger government organizations come to audit your local municipal body, there’s a lot of hell to pay at times for just standards that haven’t been set in place correctly or with changing times, organizations haven’t moved on the standardization practices that are required. So having a managed service provider that’s familiar with those strategies, compliance priorities for organizations, and being able to implement them for your specific department or entire municipal organization is really essential.
Coordinating Software Systems and Vendors
John: What are some of the challenges that arise when different municipal departments rely on separate software systems and vendors? And how can a managed IT provider help to bring those systems under a more coordinated support plan?
Nathan: I think the first thing that any managed service provider should do when assisting a municipal department is seeing where all of your departments can be streamlined to work under one infrastructure and one roof, because ultimately all of your departments are tied in together whether you realize it or not. So that could mean standardizing servers across departments and then just segmenting those based on compliance standards and cybersecurity needs.
It could mean the type of network equipment and hardware that you’re installing, standardizing Wi-Fi systems across your department offices. It can be quite a few different technical things that you think about standardizing and asking a managed service provider or having someone in your pocket to assist you with those decisions is really essential.
And the second step with that is understanding where the breakdown is between your department. So where you’re not standardized, because either you can’t be because the police department has applications that they need that have to run a certain way that’s very different from the clerk’s office.
Maybe the same software that’s used for payroll can’t be used across those different departments, but still understanding how all of that ties in and making sure that your organizational body is running efficiently and just cutting out those shortcomings and disjointed systems when you can is really important to be looking through regularly so that you’re under one comprehensive IT plan for your whole department.
Budgeting for Cybersecurity and Equipment Upgrades
John: Budgeting and procurement requirements and things like that are really important for town governments. Obviously they have to stay within a certain budget. How can towns make the necessary cybersecurity improvements and make equipment upgrades and still stick within annual budget cycles?
Nathan: With budgeting for a managed service provider and a municipal department, it’s important to always be very clear about the parameters that your organization is able to fit into the systems that are essential and non-essential, and just really planning out any sort of grant money or large IT expenses that are coming up for a year.
So a lot of municipal departments that come to a company like us at Balsam Technologies have a hard time tracking those systems across departments. While there may be a budget that comes from the top down at a municipal organization, the management of those systems might not come from the top down. So it can be really difficult to tell, without having an MSP in your back pocket, what kind of upgrades, what kind of maintenance is just needed for your IT systems? Because at the top of the department chain, they might not have management of, say, the patrolman’s software that the police officers are using.
They might not have an idea about the fire department’s security systems that are going to need upgrades and licensing for the next year. So having one managed service provider that is going through all of your departmental needs and tracking all of those expenses collectively is really important for planning out your budgeting.
Town-Wide IT Cost Planning
John: Right. Having one company that’s able to see the whole big picture so that they’re able to give good estimates to the town and say, “Hey, look, this is how much we need to budget next year for these upgrades.” And like you said, if there’s multiple companies working with different parts of the government, they’re not, maybe, communicating with each other.
Nathan: Yeah, exactly. It’s difficult when you don’t have a uniform picture because then a lot of the cost savings that could come from either large equipment orders, from streamlining systems, if we’re working with three other managed service providers for your municipal department, it would be really hard for us to all have one comprehensive solution for how to save your department money since we’re all thinking in our own specific mindset of how to serve our department, whether it be the police department that we serve, it could be the Council on Aging, it could be your animal control.
If your managed service provider is just serving one or two of those departments, they’re going to be making sure that they have the best IT support possible. And they’re not going to be looking at the broader picture that you really need to be in agreement on with all of your town-wide departments.
Backup and Continuity for Municipal Services
John: Right. What type of backup and continuity planning is needed in order to keep essential municipal services operating during an outage or a cybersecurity incident?
Nathan: So having a backup and disaster recovery plan is pretty essential for most town departments. The standards that are in place for public record and just having secure backups in place is pretty high for most government departments. And having an experienced managed service provider come in, be able to both implement and test systems for you that can properly back up your data is really essential. Whether that be something that needs to be upgraded year to year, it should be something that’s monitored consistently.
And it can often be outside of the scope of what your standard town IT help desk that you have in-house may be able to handle. So really considering the skills of the team that you have in place, if you have one, and the skills of the provider that you’re going to for IT support services, and just weighing in the costs and both that and the risk, and just figuring out what’s best for your municipal department as far as backups and keeping your data secure is really important to be fixating on for your organization.
John: All right, well, that’s really great information, Nathan. Thanks again for speaking with me today.
Nathan: Thank you, John.
John: And for more information, you can visit the Balsam Technologies website at balsamtechnologies.com or call 978-281-3339.
