REPORT/RECOMMENDATION TO THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
OF SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY
AND RECORD OF ACTION
June 18, 2025
FROM
LYNN FYHRLUND, Chief Information Officer, Innovation and Technology Department
SUBJECT
Title
Mutual Nondisclosure Agreement with Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.
End
RECOMMENDATION(S)
Recommendation
Approve a non-financial Mutual Nondisclosure Agreement with Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., to allow for evaluation of the Managed Cloud Services, with a contract period of June 18, 2025, through June 17, 2026.
(Presenter: Lynn Fyhrlund, Chief Information Officer, 388-5501)
Body
COUNTY AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER GOALS & OBJECTIVES
Improve County Government Operations.
FINANCIAL IMPACT
Approval of this item will not result in the use of Discretionary General Funding (Net County Cost). The Mutual Nondisclosure Agreement (Agreement) with Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (Esri) is non-financial in nature and does not commit the County to make any purchases.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
ITD and other County departments utilize Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to visualize, understand, and interpret data. GIS is a computer system or mapping software that visualizes, analyzes, interprets, and displays data through the lens of geography. Esri is a company headquartered in Redlands, within San Bernardino County, and is the industry leader best known for its suite of GIS software products called ArcGIS. ArcGIS is a geospatial software designed for viewing, editing, managing, and analyzing geographic data through maps, applications, dashboards, and reports, to reveal relationships, patterns, and trends from a wide variety of information.
The County utilizes both ArcGIS Enterprise, which is an ITD-hosted and managed GIS platform, as well ArcGIS Online, which is a cloud-based Esri-hosted and managed GIS platform. The ArcGIS Enterprise platform is utilized for applications built to store and manage regulated data, imagery hosting and processing, the County’s new Parcel Fabric parcel boundary management system, and other software offerings only available with ArcGIS Enterprise. The ArcGIS Enterprise environment is complex and requires specialized expertise and knowledge to ensure minimal downtime and maximum utilization of everything the platform has to offer. Currently, the platform requires several complex upgrades to be undertaken over the next several years.
Due to the complex nature of an ArcGIS Enterprise environment, Esri offers managed cloud hosting services which allow an organization to offload management and support of its ArcGIS Enterprise onto Esri’s Managed Cloud Services. This platform includes 24x7 support by Esri experts who would maintain the County’s critical GIS infrastructure.
Approval of the Agreement will allow Esri to disclose information from its System and Organization Controls (SOC2) report to determine the feasibility of entering into a service agreement for these services and will allow for a comprehensive evaluation and examination of their ecosystem from various perspectives, including, but not limited to, security (i.e., cyber, information, and physical), infrastructure architecture, and networking aspects of the Esri Managed Cloud solution. Without a Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement, this information cannot be released to ITD.
ITD recommends the approval of the Agreement to enable ITD to evaluate and examine the Esri Managed Cloud platform to assess if it can meet the needs of the County as a suitable and sustainable enterprise solution.
PROCUREMENT
Not applicable.
REVIEW BY OTHERS
This item has been reviewed by Bonnie Uphold, Supervising Deputy County Counsel, 387-5455) on January 17, 2025; Purchasing (Dylan Newton, Buyer III, 387-2065) on January 16, 2025; Risk Management (Gregory Ustaszewski, Staff Analyst II, 386-9008) on January 15, 2025; Finance and Administration (Ivan Ramirez, Administrative Analyst, 387-4020) on May 28, 2025; and County Finance and Administration (Paloma Hernandez-Barker, Deputy Executive Officer, 387-5423) on May 30, 2025.