State College reviews IT projects in 2026–2030 capital improvement plan, proposes data lake and security upgrades
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Summary
At its June 9 work session the State College Borough Council reviewed the IT section of the 2026–2030 capital improvement plan, where staff described a phased document-management/data-lake project, ongoing network upgrades, a 2026 hyperconverged cluster replacement and a planned firewall replacement in 2029.
The State College Borough Council on June 9 reviewed information-technology investments included in the borough’s 2026–2030 capital improvement plan (CIP), with the borough’s chief information officer outlining four principal projects: a document-management system with a data-lake component, next-generation firewall and security upgrades (planned mainly for 2029), ongoing network-infrastructure upgrades, and a scale-cluster (hyperconverged) replacement in 2026.
Tony, the borough’s Chief Information Officer, told council that the document-management project scoped in the 2025 CIP will proceed into a second phase described as a data lake. “A data lake is a centralized and deduplicated repository for borough data,” Tony said, adding that the project would improve searching, reporting and analytics and that the plan includes an open-data component to make appropriate datasets available to the public.
Tony said most spending for the data-lake work is expected in 2026 and will primarily cover software and cloud storage. He explained the scale-cluster replacement—where the borough’s internal servers and storage live—will be a one-time acquisition in 2026 as the existing cluster nears end-of-life.
On security, Tony described an intention to pursue a zero-trust architecture and to replace next-generation firewalls in 2029; he said the borough has already rolled out two-factor authentication for borough employees and is standardizing single sign-on via Microsoft Entra ID. Network infrastructure was described as a rolling maintenance and upgrade cost across the five-year plan, reflecting increasing data demands and more services migrating to cloud-hosted applications.
Council members asked about public benefits of the data lake and whether the capital plan itself could be stored and diffed in the system; Tony confirmed the CIP could be stored in the data lake and allow year-to-year comparisons. Tony also said the borough currently has a dedicated 1-gigabit “pipe” for borough business served by First Light and a separate public Wi-Fi connection provided by Comcast; he noted some partners share capacity and that borough data usage trends are being monitored to inform future bandwidth or hardware investments. He described a partner organization, Keystone WREN (formerly Kimber), that participates in Internet2 and could be a public-private partner for connectivity improvements.
Council members were reminded by staff that projects listed in the CIP are planning-level items and do not become committed expenditures until budgeted in the annual budget process.
No formal vote was taken; the council review will continue in future meetings as staff and council move toward the public hearing and budgeting processes.
