As cities and counties across the country have found when their technology becomes unavailable, it can be difficult to continue operations without significant disruption. These disasters can come in the form of cybersecurity attack, major system failure, tornado or other weather event, or even sickness affecting a significant number of IT staff.
While private sector organizations such as cybersecurity specialists, hardware and software vendors can all play a role in helping restore an organization's IT capabilities, municipal IT leaders in North Texas developed this Interlocal Agreement to provide mutual aid services to a network of government entities participating in the agreement. The agreement provides a framework for organizations like Allen to both request help and respond to requests for help in the event of a disaster. Similar to mutual aid agreements used by cities for Fire Department services, this agreement sets the terms in advance to speed response and clarify roles and responsibilities.
The scope of this agreement covers mutual aid services in the form of both personnel and equipment. The response aspect is entirely voluntary, and Allen would only provide aid in the case where we had the ability and capacity to respond. The expectation for any responder is not to provide high-level expertise to diagnose, solve or fully remediate the issue, but instead provide additional hands, boots on the ground, that can provide technical assistance while the requesting organization's resources are engaged with the root cause of the disaster. For example, in the case of a cyber-attack, Allen as a responding organization would not be tasked with stopping the attack, but could instead provide staff to help re-image computers or provide employee technical support or deploy spare Allen desktop PCs for a short period.
The timeline for responding to any event is expected to be short in duration. Costs incurred, such as overtime for responders, would be paid by the requesting organization per this agreement.
The City of Allen has volunteered to take the lead role as the managing entity for the group of cities and potentially counties that would participate. We will keep the list of participating agencies and help communicate aid requests when needed. This first agreement is between the two founding organizations, Allen and University Park. Representatives from McKinney, Euless, and Mesquite have also indicated their interest in adopting the ILA as well.
Adopting a mutual aid ILA for technology is a best practice approach to preparing for cyber and other incidents. By adopting the ILA, Allen shows that it continues to plan ahead to ensure it is ready to act and respond in the event of future incidents.