Imperial County OKs three-year IT contract with Expert Networks

EL CENTRO — The Imperial County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday, Aug. 12, to approve a $120,000-per-year contract with Expert Networks, Inc., a network engineering firm that has supported the county’s information technology systems for several years. 

The agreement, renewed for at least the next three years, will continue the company’s work in network architecture, cybersecurity and technical support for county operations.

Under the contract, Expert Networks will be paid $10,000 per month, totaling $360,000 over three years. The scope includes management of the county’s network infrastructure, firewall and router configuration, Microsoft domain administration, cybersecurity enhancements and daily operational support. The company will also continue assisting the Sheriff’s Office in maintaining compliance with strict law enforcement data security standards.

IT Director Henry Felix told the board the continued partnership was critical to protecting the county’s systems from cyberattacks. 

“Some of you were here in 2019 and some of you were not, so I haven’t had the opportunity to explain to you what happened to us. But we were all over the newspaper in a very negative way. We got a ransomware attack and were absolutely taken down,” Felix said. “The main reason, essentially, was we didn’t have a really good security stance from a network perspective.

“We basically, in the most simplest terms, don’t want a repeat of what happened that year,” he said in an interview. “We were basically using them as a staff augmentation for that specialized knowledge so we can continue — not just as a one time event — but harden our environment, our network from foreign actors penetrating and exploiting our network.”

Expert Networks’ specialization includes “network engineering, which is a specialization of information technology. Basically, the management of firewalls, routers and network switches,” Felix said. “They also help us out in the avenue of management of some of the more advanced things like certificate services for Active Directory — really specialized expert knowledge around the fields of Microsoft domain administration.”

Felix said the company’s work is more than advisory. “It’s not just consulting, they actually do the work,” he said. “We use them basically on a daily basis for the very reasons I just stated.”

Imperial County’s network is the largest of any agency in the Imperial Valley, Felix told supervisors. “Our county, by a huge margin, actually has the largest network out of any agency in the entire Imperial Valley. You’ve got network across over a hundred buildings in every city in the county, and it’s all interconnected because we have systems that are housed either here in this building or, in the case of the sheriff’s office, in their administration building. They’ve got a separate data center out there.”

The IT department has only one network administrator, Ramon Rodriguez. “We just don’t have the funding, specifically the funding to basically allocate enough compensation to attract somebody of the caliber that’s necessary to maintain a network of this complexity and size,” Felix said.

He credited Expert Networks with helping the county recover after the ransomware attack. “They were integral in basically getting us to recover from the ransomware attack. We’ve used them to re-architect our system and help maintain this network,” Felix said. “We’ve established a partnership that goes well beyond a transactional. We’ve actually grown together. Without them, I have no doubt that we would not be in the position we’re in today. None of what we’re doing — even this board meeting — wouldn’t work without all the work that’s been put in place to make that happen.”

Felix said network security now ranks highly in independent assessments. “We have done assessments of our network from a cybersecurity perspective and we actually score very, very well. In fact, we rank equivalent to what banks are doing with their networks,” he told supervisors. “I’ve been told by manufacturers of a variety of tools used that we are doing exceptionally well in terms of utilizing what we’ve procured and actually put in production.”

In the interview with Imperial Valley Weekly, Felix described the complexity of building such defenses. “There’s actually very few people in the world even that can even begin to grasp the complexity. How do you begin to architect essentially a defense? We call it an onion, like a defense onion,” he said. “There’s no one technology. It’s actually a combination of things. It’s policy, process and technology. All are required to work in sync in order to actually have a defense posture that’s effective. Just because the attackers don’t stop evolving. We have to continue to evolve and keep up on all of the above in order to keep one step ahead from being breached. It’s not easy.”

See also

He said Imperial County is taking measures that most counties have not. “I think we’re in a good position, you know? I’ve talked to my peers in other counties and we’re doing things that 95 percent of the counties aren’t doing. We use quite a few commercial off-the-shelf systems and it’s a good sign when they complain that things are really restrictive in our network,” Felix said. “They’re used to getting handed the keys of the kingdom. That is not the case.”

The contract also covers work for the sheriff’s office, which operates under FBI-mandated security rules for law enforcement data. 

“The sheriff’s office is a distinct entity and they have their own everything,” Felix said. “The reason why is because they actually have to follow CJIS — California Justice Information Systems — security guidelines.They’re the only department (that needs to follow these guidelines), and it’s very rigorous. It’s set by the Federal Bureau of Investigation because they handle criminal data and their information systems house information that deals with people who have committed criminal offenses. Expert Networks does get background checked yearly in order to participate and help manage that environment.”

Felix said the county does not wait for annual security reviews to address weaknesses. “We actually do very well in our security assessments. We actually score very well. And we try to remediate whatever findings that come out. But we don’t wait for those assessments. We actually proactively have a wide variety of tools that are continuously trying to find weaknesses within our network and outside of our network at the same time. It’s just really what security is all about,” he said. “And we’re doing it with very, very little resources compared to some of the large agencies that have the actual budget to do these things.”

He said he was proud of the results the county has achieved. “So in a nutshell, I think I’m pretty proud of what we’ve done,” Felix said.

Supervisors approved the contract on a 5-0 vote with no opposition or questions. The agreement is set to keep Expert Networks embedded in the county’s IT operations through at least 2027.