Lean Team, Big Responsibility
A mid-sized Texas county government was managing its entire technology operation with a lean IT team who were responsible for everything from daily work orders and access control to security camera networks and call management. When a new IT Director stepped into his role, cybersecurity had never had a dedicated owner. That was about to change.
Forty-Five Pages of Wake-Up Call
The wake-up call came in the form of paperwork. When the county went to renew its cybersecurity insurance, the application had ballooned into a 45-page document demanding EDR (endpoint detection and response software), next-generation antivirus, and more security controls the county simply didn't have. "We only had a firewall and antivirus," said Ray, the IT Director. "That's about it. Nothing past that."
Meanwhile, ransomware attacks on Atlanta and Dallas made the threat landscape impossible to ignore. "They're not going after just Fortune 500 companies now," Ray noted. "Now they're going after counties, cities, municipalities and we kind of just saw we were lacking."
Day-to-day, the team's security operation was almost entirely reactive. "We'd get an email alert, ‘hey, this PC might be infected,’ and we'd have to go chase it," Ray recalled. "There just wasn't time to be proactive. We just hoped nothing bad would happen."
We Don't Want to Be in the News
The consequences of inaction weren't abstract. Nearby government organizations had already suffered public breaches. "I didn't want that to be us,” Ray said, then adding a personal note in the back of the mind of many IT directors, “I also knew I would be asked to resign if something bad happened."
Not a Vendor but Part of the Team
The county began working with Recon around the same time it started investing in new security tools. They quickly found that buying technology and actually running it were two different problems. "We bought Carbon Black, we bought other solutions," Ray explained. "But that means 10 more dashboards to watch on top of still having our day-to-day stuff. And we didn't have a cyber person."
Recon stepped in to absorb that operational load. Progress was deliberate: MFA went out county-wide first, then password policy reform, phishing simulation training, and email filtering. Regular cadence meetings kept things moving. "Every week it was just nice to see our security posture score just keep going up and up," Ray said.
What distinguished the relationship, in Ray's telling, wasn't the technology, it was the people. "It felt like with Recon we were filling a whole role for the county. We weren't dealing with a salesperson or an account manager. We were dealing with actual fellow IT employees who just happened to be specifically focused on cyber."
That partnership eventually extended to defining and hiring the county's first dedicated cybersecurity analyst. Recon helped write the job description. When the county's new cybersecurity analyst joined in that role, the experience of working alongside Recon's team was something closer to a mentor than a vendor relationship. "It's not just 'hey, here's what you need to do. Go!' It's more of a collaborative, learning experience," the new team member said. "Being able to bounce ideas back and forth, that's what I've enjoyed."
"We weren't ever left to do it on our own. Every week it was nice to see our security posture keep going up. It feels like Recon is part of the county team."
— IT Director, mid-sized Texas county
The Call We Didn't Have to Panic About
The shift from reactive to proactive became concrete during a 2023 ransomware campaign that hit Dallas. The FBI contacted the county's sheriff's office with concerns about a license plate reader software the county had previously used. Recon was already on it. "When we asked during our monthly call they said, 'Oh yeah, y'all are good, we're already aware of this,'" Ray recalled. "Right there, that just made us feel okay. Whatever we were paying at the time, it's already paid for itself. We saw what it did to Dallas."
Today, the county's cybersecurity analyst reviews cases in Recon's portal, runs threat hunts alongside the Recon team, and collaborates with Recon's analysts when findings warrant a second set of eyes. The county now has visibility into not just the outside attacks, but also the lateral movements within their networks that simply didn't exist before. "Before, we were always worried about what's trying to get into our environment," Ray observed. "Now there's somebody monitoring the inside too."
For the county's infrastructure lead, the change is felt as much as it is measured. "I rest a lot easier because of Recon," he said. "I don't worry so much, and that's good."
To protect our customer’s privacy, identifying details in this case study have been changed or omitted. Quotes are drawn from a recorded interview with minor edits for grammar and clarity.
