Staff recommends that City Council approve the KnowBe4 Licensing One-Year Agreement and approve a one-time payment of $22,452.43.

The City currently utilizes two separate vendors for cybersecurity awareness training and phishing simulations. Consolidating these services under KnowBe4 will automate the deployment of phishing campaigns, align training content with individual employee behavior, reduce administrative workload, and slightly lower annual costs. This agreement strengthens the City’s cybersecurity risk posture while streamlining vendor oversight.

• The City currently uses two separate vendors, Mimecast Engage and CanIPhish, for its security awareness training. Mimecast offers a limited amount of content refresh of approximately 12–15 new training modules per year.
• The separation of vendors means phishing failures from an employee on the CanIPhish platform are not connected to the training content presented in Mimecast.
• Phishing campaigns currently must be sent manually by the IT Security Engineer. The KnowBe4 platform automates campaign deployment and delivers training content tailored to each user’s past behavior, consolidating the City’s cybersecurity training under one vendor.
•  KnowBe4 offers over 1,000 training modules and reduces staff time by decreasing the time required to create and deploy a phishing campaign from days to seconds.

Staff will purchase the software through NASPO cooperative purchasing Contract #AR2472, which ensures a competitive public procurement process and is consistent with the legal principles of open access, fairness, and transparency. The NASPO contract is available to eligible government entities and complies with all City purchasing policies and Federal contract provisions. The NASPO contract was competed via State of Montana cooperative purchasing Contract #AR2472. SHI is an authorized reseller under OMNIA Partners IT Solutions, Products & Services contract.

The total annual subscription cost is $22,452.43 for the one-year term (FY2027).

Funding is available within the approved IT software budget.

The Mimecast Engage training platform costs $17,547.00 per year and the CanIPhish subscription costs $5,670.00 per year, for a total of $23,217.00 annually. KnowBe4 results in a net annual savings of $764.57.

City Council may:
1. Approve the KnowBe4 One Year License Agreement; or
2. Not approve and provide staff direction on how to proceed.