SITKA, ALASKA
But Assembly member Thor Christianson asked whether there were savings to be had in the city’s I-T department. He asked information systems Director Gary McCarty whether the city could use something called “cloud computing,” where files are stored remotely, rather than in machines the city must purchase.
“That wasn’t available five years ago, really, and now it is,” Christianson said. “Would it be more cost effective to not have internal servers, or at a bare minimum, just enough to allow us to use the online data storage?”
McCarty said the city has explored cloud computing, but that the connection would operate at a fraction of the speed of the city’s existing server. And, he said, city data would have other problems if it were stored off-site, in what’s called “the cloud.”
“It’s really cheap to go and get 5 gigabytes to store out there in the cloud for your own personal files,” McCarty said. “But we have more needs than that in a file system. We have to be able to share those files, control who has access to their files, at a pretty good security level.”
The city’s information tech budget went unchanged by the Assembly on Thursday night. If approved in its current form, it will be 8 percent higher than last year’s budget.
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