Earlier this summer, city councilors unanimously backed a new three-year contract with the information technology company that has been part of the city since 2011.
On July 12, councilors voted in favor of the contract with Apex Technology Group for technology services for the town and school district of Cheshire. The annual cost to the City will be $331,080, with the term running from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2025. The new contract resulted in an increase of $93,000 over the most recent terms with Apex, which were $238,080. $.
Steve Carroll, chairman of the city’s technology study group, said the city initially employed two computer technicians. When the study group was formed in 2011, however, Carroll, along with other city officials, determined that the way technology had been handled in the city had not been effective.
“Around 2011 I was asked by the then City Manager to get involved with the (study group) and it quickly became apparent that the state of our technology in Cheshire was like a dumpster fire. garbage,” Carroll said. “If it wasn’t broken, it was going to break soon. That’s when the group was born.
The technology group employed Apex as consultants to identify “critical items” that needed to be addressed, according to Carroll.
“They kept going and, really, we’ve worked it out so far,” Carroll said. “I think we have a top-notch network.”
Carroll added that hiring two technicians now, both of which would be senior level positions and would require benefits, could cost the city at least $350,000 a year. Not only would hiring two new staff members be expensive, but their knowledge would be limited.
“They won’t know everything about everything because there aren’t two technicians or two people in the world who know everything about everything,” Carroll said. “…What you gain with Apex is that you have access to all of their expertise.”
Apex and the technology study group already have plans to further improve services in the city, including the implementation of “disaster recovery”, which would allow the city to use cloud services to recover data. lost.
Apex also offered a “colocation” data center – a centralized location for equipment/servers – which Carroll says the city does not have the infrastructure or space to host due to specific requirements. in terms of temperature, humidity and fire prevention.
“We don’t really have the environmental conditions to support that here, unless you want to make a capital investment,” Carroll said.
Collocation “mitigates the top-down capital expenditure” that the City would otherwise have to invest, Carroll continued, which is the opposite of what the Council is working towards.
Councilman Peter Talbot, who also sits on the technology group, agreed with Carroll.
“The Board has been extremely supportive of capital money over the years,” Talbot said. “Before it was a lot (higher demands) but we found ourselves – in 11 years – we got ourselves into maintenance status rather than making up for lost time fixing everything.”
