The action being requested of the City Council is to review and consider the approval of the attached proposal for the purchase of the Bitdefender MDR and XDR software services. This is a budgeted item proposed in the 23/24 Capital Software budget of Technology Solutions.  The estimated amount is not to exceed $45,000.00. The purchase would be made through a 3^rd party vendor vTECH iO DBA Computers At Work! Inc who is a reseller we use for software purchasing and they are also a reseller partner of Bitdefender. This purchase would allow the city to use a piggyback agreement on an existing Omni Partner local government Contract Cumber #R200803 for Cyber Security Solutions and Associated Products & Services.

The purpose of this purchase is to continue our improvements of cybersecurity. This purchase is an add on to our existing Bitdefender software by replacing existing network security software services utilized for Managed Detection. This purchase is in addition to the services we receive from Bit defender for endpoint security. This purchase adds additional network security using Bitdefender’s XDR software which includes Security Operation Services for detecting and monitoring network security. This purchase provides additional network security for the city’s internal network using Extended and Managed Detection & Response to network traffic. Additionally, with this software purchase we would receive security operational services to where we would have an additional set of eyes to monitor our network traffic.  The city utilized similar services in the past from two different vendors SecNap and Tyler Detect, who together provided similar services that we would receive from Bitdefender. SecNap and Tyler Detect together cost over $80,000 a year for security services. The Bitdefender purchase not only is a somewhat of a cost savings, but we receive better managed security services, and it is one of the best software vendors in the network security industry. The intent with this purchase is to replace services we receive from Secnap and Tyler Detect with Bitdefender because it provides additional security with its ability to provide Extended Detection & Response, Managed Detect and Response and SOC services. Many security solutions require multiple additional security technologies and integrations with third parties for threat prevention, detection, and response. Embedded into Bitdefender’s industry-leading prevention and detection technologies, GravityZone XDR is designed to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of security teams, minimize attacker dwell time, and enable organizational cyber resilience. The solution monitors a wide range of physical and virtual assets, connected devices, cloud platforms, and workloads. We would benefit from out-of-the-box analytics and advanced heuristics which correlates to disparate alerts, enabling quick triage of incidents and rapid attack containment through automated and guided response. detailed dark web analysis by searching for lists of stolen credentials and exposed information about user accounts across the Internet.