The Homewood Village Board approved a contract with Urban Communications to update its 14-year-old network firewall that will improve the communications systems at village hall, the fire and police departments, public works, the Brian Carey Training Center, and lawn and maintenance crews.
The contract for $50,534 also includes three years of licensing and support.
For the past five years, Homewood has been using a cloud-based software for most processes. This can be problematic since it fully depends on an internet connection that is reliable, fast, and safe, according to Terence Acquah, assistant village manager. To protect connections against outage situations or bad actors, the village uses firewalls.
The purpose of network firewalls is crucial to protect computer systems from harm, such as viruses, malware, spyware, and other malicious software, and from being hacked. Firewalls also allow monitoring over employees to make sure that state and internal policies are being met, Acquah said.
All businesses and organizations use firewalls, which are equipment or software that stays between the internet and the internal network of an organization. The firewalls use programmed rules and services to filter through traffic, and also includes Virtual Private Networks (VPN). VPN allows remote users to connect to the network.
Homewood’s current firewalls are outdated, and have been in use since 2010.
The village’s existing setup is connected to a single hub. That means if the hub fails, then all of the systems will fail. This would disrupt all facilities in the village, Acquah said.
To prevent such a negative impact, the village will implement a new setup where each network will have multiple connections. This will eliminate the dependency on one source, resulting in a more secure and reliable connection.
Urban Communications’ work is projected to take around six to eight months to complete. The majority of the project will be funded through American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Funds.
