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Stafford IT director urges council to restore security and subscription funding; council delays final vote

5776772 · September 10, 2025
AI-Generated Content: All content on this page was generated by AI to highlight key points from the meeting. For complete details and context, we recommend watching the full video. so we can fix them.

Summary

IT Director Ryan outlined a roughly $268,000 software subscription need and said the department required $208,000 above the proposed budget to cover software, hardware support and data circuits. Councilmembers discussed restoring the funds but did not take a final vote, opting to 'tag' the request and return with reconciled numbers.

Stafford’s IT director told the City Council on Wednesday that the department requires additional recurring funding for software subscriptions, hardware support and data circuits to maintain basic city operations and protect the network from ransomware and other threats.

The request and the case for it IT Director Ryan said the department’s essential, citywide subscriptions (Microsoft enterprise, spam filtering, security monitoring and backups) total $254,872 based on this year’s invoices and that realistic planning should include a 5% inflationary cushion. ‘‘If we’re going to be realistic about it… I suggest we do because this happens every single year,’’ Ryan said, adding that with the 5% cushion the software subscription need would be about $268,000.

Ryan said software-as-a-service contracts reduce the need for in-house database…

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