Jako van Blerk, chief information officer, appeared last month in front of the Finance Audit Budget Committee of the county Board of Commissioners seeking to increase his department’s allocation from $17.4 million to $19.4 million for 2025.
The proposal will be mulled by commissioners who are scheduled to approve the budget later this month.
About $500,000 of the increase would go toward hiring a system’s analyst for the Clerk’s Office and a systems technician for the Prosecutor’s Office to address the continuing rising use of technology in those departments, as well as standard pay increases.
The Clerk’s Office position, who would be the first dedicated IT staffer to that department, would “assist with planning, testing and implementation of new systems as well as upgrades, and as their business progresses, help them adapt from a technology standpoint,” van Blerk told commissioners.
At the Prosecutor’s Office, an IT systems analyst was dedicated in recent years due to the dramatic increase use of technology under Prosecutor Peter Lucido. Now, van Blerk wants to add a systems technician to deal with “endpoint” devices, such as computers, phones and printers.
“The complexity of the prosecutor’s systems demands more dedicated support,” he said.
Van Blerk is also asking to restore an old paid intern position that was one of two such positions abandoned in 2020. He said IT benefits from the interns as much as the interns benefit from working in IT.
“We find over the years getting talent fresh out of school is extremely important, when you have people out of the IT world,” he told the board. “Over the years we’ve actually hired some of these as employees and they’ve always been good hires. I think it’s a good way of getting involved with the younger people and also benefiting from a hire at a later point in time.”
Some $935,000 would go toward replacing more than half of the approximately 1,300 laptop computers in the county next year and the rest in 2026 because they have reached their five-year recommended lifespan, he said. The county has nearly 3,000 employees.
He said “many years ago” the county did not replace computers at their recommended disposal time.
“It caused us quite a bit of difficulties,” he said. “We just didn’t want to go beyond that threshold again.”
Laptop use became widespread among county employees in 2020 as most were working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
Most employees have either a laptop and/or one of the nearly 1,000 desktop computers, and some have multiple desktops, he said in an interview.
Some of the old laptops will be forwarded to other entities, such as Headstart for “some basic operations,” some will be sold and others will be retained as backup, he said. The devices are “cleaned” before being passed on, he said.
“We always keep a surplus of laptops for things unseen, and we get requests for them,” he said.
He also is seeking a $100,000 increase in “contract services” to $945,000 to hire outside contractors to help with specialized IT projects.
“We’ve increased, pretty much doubled, since 2020 our output when it comes to projects,” he said. “Those contracting positions from a project-manager standpoint many times have very specialized requirements.”
Another $700,000 increase to $9.3 million, which represents nearly half of the IT budget, is being sought in the “repairs & maintenance” line item. Funds would go to CyberforceQ, which van Blerk called “our security partner”; Canva, a video-editing service that is increasingly being used by various county departments; a “customer-relationship-management” software system use by the board; Tadpoles, an administrative and educational system used at Headstart; and Security Scorecard, which allows IT to rate vendors “so we can determine whether, from a security standpoint, we are happy with the quality of security they have in their systems, and it has helped us a lot in the past year,” according to van Blerk.
Regarding cybersecurity, van Blerk said nearly 2% of IT’s budget is spent on preventing hacks, below the recommended level of 2.5% but sufficient.
He said in an interview the county could spend “millions and millions of dollars” on cybersecurity but it would not guarantee against a cyber attack.
“I definitely can’t give you that assurance that we’ll never be hacked,” van Blerk said at the meeting in response to a question by board Chair Don Brown, who mentioned the recent hack of Wayne County computer systems. “They say it’s a matter of when. … We spend quite a bit of money on it.
“We go out and buy things we believe are most effective. That’s why we have a security partner. Those guys are in touch with business” and governments. “They see what’s happening in the industry. From out standpoint, it’s vital to have a partner like that.
“I think we’ve done a good job over the years when you look at our security scores. We are always looking to improve them.”
The county uses Abnormal Security and Crowdstrike.
He said the emphasis of cybersecurity has shifted over the years from protecting networks and hard drives to preventing “phishing,” hackers gaining access via a fake email that an unsuspecting “clicks on” or responds to.
“The shift in security has moved from the endpoint and perimeter protection — trying to stop stuff in through our firewalls and things like that,” van Blerk said. “That’s not what people (hackers) use. What they use is every one of us. They try to use our vulnerabilities to come into a system and from there they attack you.”
IT employs a full-time security administrator dedicated solely to cybersecurity plus software.
Employees are also trained in cybersecurity, particularly to guard against phishing attacks in which a hacker sends a fake email disguised as a legitimate email to get the employee to respond and/or click on something that will give the hacker access to the county network.
IT goes as far as testing employees with fake email to see if they will and open and reply to them. Those who fail receive extra training.
“We try to get people (employees) to very alert about emailing,” van Blerk said
That practice has been taking place for over a year, and the percentage of employees who improperly respond to a fake email has decreased since it started, he added.
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