MOUNT VERNON — Redundancy is well-known to engineers and IT techs. In those sectors, redundancy means ensuring backup components and procedures are in place should the original ones fail.
Redundancy can be mandated, as in the case of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency requiring backup controls at a water treatment plant. Or it can be prudent, as a safeguard against falling victim to a cyberattack.
Knox County Recorder Tanner Salyers has taken steps to ensure the latter.
On Dec. 26, 2022, the recorder’s office was locked out of its data when a cyberattack targeted its records management vendor, Cott Systems. As a result, staff members were reduced to manually tracking incoming documents; more significantly, it affected title searches, lending, and the real estate market.
Salyers said two positive things came from the situation: moving to internal hosting of data and the switch to West Virginia-based Compiled Technologies.
Salyers acknowledged that not every county is able to have an internal IT department but said, “for us, it fits.”
“I’ll never say something is completely safe from being hacked, but you can take yourself out of that risk category,” he said. “I was able to take us out of that risk category [of a third-party vendor] and bring it home.
“We are a rural county, but we are blessed with an incredibly competent IT department. Kudos to the county commissioners … they have sought out and invested in quality people.”
Everything the office takes in now is on the new Compiled system. Salyers said a transition of this type typically takes months; Compiled did it in three days.
“We were up and recording and making documents available to the public while Cott was still down. The other counties trying to do what we did still aren’t as far along as we are,” he said.
Salyers credits the quick turnaround to the recorder’s office staff being superb at their job and having an excellent IT department.
“Compiled said we are the smoothest one they’ve ever done. They actually went around and thanked the commissioners and complimented them,” he said.
In taking steps to ensure data safety, Salyers turned to his philosophy that government should be effective, efficient, responsive, and responsible. Being responsive, he said, means “finding all internal redundancies to make sure this never happens again.”
The county will keep backup tapes on-site to complement the lower risk of being hosted internally. As a second redundancy, Compiled will keep encrypted backups off-site as a precaution should the county’s backups become corrupted.
Salyers said that if the system gets wiped out, Compiled can restore the data in four to six hours. He attributes the short time frame to Compiled working with much less data, unlike Cott, which works with 300 to 400 governments.
The third redundancy involves routinely backing up the digital image library onto an external hard drive disconnected from the internet. The fourth is copying digital images onto 100-year non-silver microfilm that will be indexed and stored in the basement of the service center.
Citing “closer access with greater security,” Salyers said the fifth redundancy is moving data stored on 500-year silver microfilm to a location where the county can retrieve it within hours. The microfilm was stored in a mountain in Pennsylvania.
Salyers said the cost of redundancies and data protection will be negligible compared to what the county now pays.
Hosting data on an internal server will involve a one-time expense of $3,000. The actual cost for space on a new server is $6,000, but the recorder’s office is cost-sharing with another department.
Cott’s fee ran around $3,000 a month. With Compiled and internal hosting, Salyers anticipates a monthly expense of $2,500.
“The silver microfilm cost we are already paying; recording on non-silver microfilm, that will be an additional cost, but I think as we’ve seen, that’s important and worth the investment,” Salyers said. “We won’t do it all at once. The costs will be spread out and hardly noticeable.”
Salyers said additional benefits of working with Compiled include a faster search and a simplistic Microsoft-based system.
“It’s a smarter system than what Cott had, and it’s simplistic. Too many bells and whistles cause a greater chance of breakdown. It has features people find helpful in searching but nothing real complicated,” he said.
“They have been very helpful given the situation we’ve been in,” he continued. “It has been impressed upon everybody that you are just one bad mistake away from losing everything.
“I am confident we have responded to this in every way we can and cost effectively, too.”
