Before this year’s Town Meeting, Town Administrator Tim Bragan had a streamlined plan to replace the town’s two aging servers with two brand-new servers, and to have those servers up and running in time for the move back into Town Hall in late May. But (with apologies to Joni Mitchell) clouds got in his way.
At this year’s Town Meeting, several residents questioned the need for new servers, given the fast-growing move to “the cloud” (see explanation below). The motion that requested $30,000 to “replace two 15-year-old servers and install new ones” was amended to say “replace two 15-year old servers with an appropriate replacement product or service.” Following the meeting, Bragan notified Guardian Information Technologies in Leominster, the company that put together the proposal for the new servers, that the purchase was on hold.
Pressure for change builds
In the weeks since Town Meeting, Bragan has been sorting out what moving data and software from the town’s servers to cloud-based servers would involve logistically, legally, and financially. He is also trying to factor in the odds of the old servers failing before cloud-based solutions for all of the data and software on those servers could be worked out. On top of that, the upcoming move back into Town Hall is adding pressure to make some decisions quickly.
Using the cloud as a replacement for town servers involves not only moving all of the data on those servers to the cloud, but also figuring out where the applications that currently run on the town servers would run. Some of the town’s applications, such as the new dog-licensing software that the town voted to purchase at this year’s Town Meeting, already run on the cloud. Most components of Munis, the financial package that the Finance Department uses, are available in a cloud-based version. But the work involved to switch from the Munis software installed on the town server to the cloud-based version is not trivial, and it would require contracting help from Tyler Technologies, the company that sells Munis.
Legal issues
There are also legal issues that are specific to data and software used by Massachusetts municipalities. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Division of Local Services, has a long list of questions that it encourages municipalities to ask when considering a cloud-based option for data or software. Most questions are on the topic of security, liability, and contract renewal or termination clauses. In addition, Bragan said that state procurement laws have not yet caught up with cloud provider contract models. If the town had to put out an invitation to bid every time a contract was expiring, it could mean moving to another provider every few years, because the town is required to go with the company that has the lowest bid.
Another stumbling block to transferring all of the town’s server content to the cloud is that some software that the town uses is not available in a cloud-based version yet, specifically, the assessment software distributed by Vision Government Solutions Inc. Bragan is in the process of speaking to Vision about its future plans regarding the cloud. If the company has none, the town could still choose to install Vision’s existing software on the cloud, but Bragan says that Vision would have to give its permission to do so. In addition, because the Vision software is not cloud-based, more advanced technology and a high level of technical expertise would be required to make that software accessible on the cloud.
If a decision is made in the next few weeks to go ahead with the new server purchase, the delay caused by looking into other options may make the May 26 date unreachable. Meanwhile, the two existing servers are old. When Guardian technicians diagnosed a network problem last summer, Bragan said that they were surprised by their age: one is 12 years old, the other 15. They told Bragan that a typical server life is seven years. If the old servers need to be moved back into Town Hall, the town would hire Guardian to help with the move by backing up data before the move and making sure everything is running properly and no data has been lost after the move. But because of the age of the servers, Guardian is not willing to guarantee that nothing will be lost, or even that the old servers will boot up after the move.
Bragan hopes to present all of his findings at the May 3 Board of Selectmen meeting. In an interview, he said that he was grateful that the cloud option was raised at Town Meeting, as well as by emails from a few residents prior to Town Meeting. “I’m glad people brought it up,” he said. “We’re making every effort to see what we can do. If Vision is planning to go cloud-based, that would make the decision for us.”
