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Department of State seeks $5 million to modernize Sunbiz and $800,000 for password protections
Summary
The Division of Corporations asked the committee for recurring funding to add password protection and nonrecurring funds to competitively procure a replacement for the 34‑year‑old Sunbiz business registry, which processes millions of filings and generates hundreds of millions in revenue.
Secretary of State Cord Byrd told the committee the Division of Corporations' online business registry, Sunbiz, is 34 years old and runs on legacy code and infrastructure that the department considers unsustainable.
"Sunbiz encompasses all of the online and internal applications and processes that the Division of Corporations uses to provide service to over 3 and a half million business entities," Byrd told the subcommittee. He said last year nearly 700,000 new business filings occurred and that the system generates more than $575 million in general revenue annually.
Byrd outlined a recent history of the modernization effort: internal development completed about 40 percent of a replacement, a vendor engagement was disrupted when the vendor was acquired and the project was canceled in 2022. The department since migrated the legacy system to a virtualized environment in cooperation with FLDS and the Northwest Regional Data Center. Byrd said the virtualized environment runs "five times faster than the physical hardware" and reduces the risk of hardware‑related outages.
To improve security for business account holders, Byrd asked the subcommittee for $800,000 in recurring general revenue to implement a password‑protected account option for any record received electronically on Sunbiz. Separately, Byrd asked for $5,000,000 in nonrecurring general revenue to continue a competitive procurement to replace and modernize Sunbiz workflows, data management and applications. "The amount represents roughly one week's revenue that the system brings into the state of Florida," Byrd said.
George Brown, identified as acting CIO for the Division of Corporations, told the committee that only a limited set of Sunbiz online filings currently use passwords (he cited notary education filings) and said the department would provide a timeline and metrics for the modernization work at the committee's request. Committee members asked for additional details on the vendor procurement timeline, milestones and key performance indicators.
Byrd and staff said modernization work must also contend with legacy application code written in COBOL and with the division's production database, which they said currently runs on an Oracle RDB instance. The department said it will provide the committee a scope and milestones for the procurement and implementation phases.
