Board of County Commissioners Business Meeting - workshop

Good morning, everyone. Let's go around the room with some introductions, please.

Jeff Baker, Commissioner.

Kendra Davis, Commissioner's Office.

Rhonda Fields, Commissioner.

Leslie Summey, Commissioner. Carrie Warren-Gully, Commissioner.

Philip Savino, I.T.

Justin Campbell, Commissioner of District 2. Tiffany Blue, County Attorney's Office.

And online, who do we have there? Wonderful, wonderful. Director Savino.

Okay, good morning. We are here to discuss some transfer of some Fund 70 monies as You guys may remember we had come before the board, I think about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, to discuss the Google contract and moving things back on trend in order to, you know, do in the best interest of the county financially. While recently we're... We were notified that Microsoft had changed terms and conditions or at least discontinued a certain licensing that was going to cost us. Brian, is it $130,000?

The current cost is $130. The new cost would be $230. Okay. If we continue with them.

And this is a kind of licensing that you have to have in order to live up in the Google environment. So Microsoft kind of has their hand in things.

Yeah.

We were handed a lemon and so we're trying to make lemonade out of this situation and so we got with our systems team and we came up with a plan, a strategy to be able to maybe early move back down on premise before the contract ends in order to save money and balance out the difference between those costs and I'll let Brian We'll get into that in a minute. And so potentially, once we do so, we could early term the contract with Google and possibly further save the county even more money. That contract is about to the term of $48,000 a month.

So that money could be then cycled back into the budget.

So Brian, I'll let you get into more wonderful details. I know I did a 30,000 foot description of that, so go ahead.

Yeah, and that covers the basics. Like Phil said, we were looking out for the last two years projected to bring all of our servers out of the cloud environment back to our local data center before the end of the Google EA agreement, which is ending in 2027. One of the expenses we have for being up there is these Microsoft SPLA licenses. And they just license our servers to run Microsoft software. We're currently at $130,000 a year license under the SPLA. Microsoft has eliminated that license option, at least for the Google environment. So Google says they can secure additional licensing for us to make us compliant, but it's at $230,000 a year. So because we already have a plan to move back and because that's our end goal, we looked at what hardware would we need now today to make that happen. Our original plan was to put this budget cycle, a request for those fixed assets to be allocated in 2027 to do the move. So working with Finance and Lisa Stairs, we've identified enough fixed assets which cover the cost for bringing back for two storage solutions, one for production storage and one for backup storage. And what we'd like to do is to get the board's opinion and guidance on going to the second quarter budget review and asking for those assets to be allocated. Now to make this all work, there's large lean times on hardware at the moment. Use current fixed assets in place to purchase the storage units that we have allocated and then when the second quarter budget review. Hopefully, like it's the money to us we reappropriate that back into we would retake those funds to spend out of the assets we had available so that goal here is to avoid. a $230,000 bill that would hit in October if we were successful bringing down all the servers, and that would just be the licensing. Phil also mentioned that we were at about $48,000 a month on the Google contract. We'd like to be able to back and then renegotiate that. There are pieces of it that we may need to leave in place, which is our 12 month backups. So those would be done by the end of next year. But there's still the potential workaround on that. I would foresee additional savings on that. So the net summary of it all is we can do what we're going to do. We're going to do anyways next year, this year, with no new money spent this year, just pulling out fixed assets that we were going to spend next year anyways and have a cost avoidance of $230,000.

Commissioner Campbell? How did you get to the cost avoidance of $230,000? If I recall, they said the Microsoft licensing is $130,000 and then it's going to go up to $230,000. So that would be a cost avoidance of $100,000 additional, but is the $230,000 coming from we would basically cancel those contracts so we wouldn't have that license at all?

We would not renew that license, any of that license, in October.

Okay. Commissioner Warngullet?

Unless you had a follow up, I was related, but I mean, so the next question is, is okay. Expediting this. How confident are you that we can do what we need to do before October? to uh fully get out of that licensing um or is there some wiggle room here that we're gonna need to anticipate are they gonna would they do a month by month if something got held up um how confident are you guys in getting done what we need to do by october we're fairly confident all the projections from the hardware vendors on delivery of hardware

is puts us in a timeframe we can do if we can order, you know, the next two weeks per se. There is a risk. Hardware, all hardware because of the AI and big data centers, everything's taking much longer lead times to receive hardware. So that's why we're trying to go fast on it. Could there be potential if we started projecting out and we're going to, uh, encroach on that October date to renew these licenses. Um, we can go back to Google directly and see if we can get some sort of month to month on that license, but we have not secured that at this time.

Thank you. Thanks madam chair. Okay, can I just go back in time? So we moved some of our stuff to Google Cloud and then they boosted the price on us and we decided that we were going to start moving back down to on-premise. We our goal was is that that would all be done by 2027 and we would be on premise Okay, so this is just speeding it up What is the forty eight thousand dollars a month fee?

We pay them monthly in the contract Okay, it's a total of about five hundred thousand a year Okay, so we paid but So there's a

overall arching license to the cloud and then this $48,000 a month? And then there's a subscription fee. Okay, okay. So we would not have to pay the $48,000 a month and we would... I'm going to try. Okay.

how long is that license for that subscription will end in but i don't know the exact month december 2027 december of 2027 okay so we would try to term that contract early right okay and how much are i'm sorry i didn't the how much is the asset stuff

The assets are... Say again? $742,000. $742,000? Yes. Something like that? Yes. Which we would have to do anyway in 2027. Yes. That's correct. Thank you.

Commissioner Baker? So, the proposal is that the money moving up would be taken out of IG rents? Correct. Out of Fund 70? And is that because the money for 2027 is already in there or it's just been accumulating?

so there's a couple of different so there's assets that are on the current fixed asset list that were approved to be replaced this year that are related to this project that they've been holding off so it's been reappropriated so those assets are already approved and appropriated the rest of the assets have already been requested to be replaced in prior years where the asset has already been Setup also, but the appropriation has not been done So because we were waiting for the Google to see where we were at So they didn't get added to the current fixed asset list and appropriations. So at q2 the only thing we will be doing is Requesting the remaining amount that's has already been approved for replacement to be appropriated and And then we'll kind of reconfigure the asset numbers so we won't need to request any new assets, but it's just going to be requesting to reappropriate those funds from prior requests. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Lisa.

Any other comments, questions from the commissioners? Commissioner Fields? Thank you. So the subscription. Expires in December and then it will continue after that what it's going to look like beyond December. Is it an ongoing subscription fee?

We made a decision. We're not going to renew the contract It just wasn't it wasn't advantageous to the county cost wise so we were going to do this project a year from now because the contract was going to end and we weren't going to renew it and But because Microsoft kind of did the switchy-switchy on us, and we would like to do it now and save the $230,000 and potentially term out the contract early to save the $48,000 month-to-month. So we weren't going to continue beyond the December 2027.

So are there any risks involved in doing this earlier that you're aware of?

Not on the asset hardware and migration and technical side. I think if things go south with Google, which I don't think they will, and we don't return the contract early, we'd end up having to pay out the rest of the contract. But it would not have an effect on the $230,000 that we're going to have to now pay additionally because of Microsoft's switching the requirements of licensing.

Okay. Okay. So any other last commissioner comments, questions, concerns? Finance? Y'all have no issues? All right. Do we have and can we get some thumbs? Five thumbs up.

Thank you.

Yeah, you are most welcome. We try. We try. Thank you.

Have a good night.

See you. Yeah, see you later. Thanks for figuring it out. That's right.