Kent County IT leaders outline security investments and rapid growth in online services

Tim, an information-technology presenter for Kent County, told the Board of Commissioners Policy and Operations Committee on March 10 that the county’s IT operation supports roughly 2,300 endpoint devices, two county data centers and about 320–330 servers and that the team handled about 14,000 service requests in 2025.

Tim said the department has 43 staff across eight functional work teams and supports roughly 489 databases and 388 network devices. He highlighted that OnBase, the county’s document management system, now stores about 86 million pages and that the county processed about 3.44 million online transactions last year through its Access Kent portal. Tim said a new deployment tool (Dell Pro Deploy) has cut PC deployment time by about 75%, enabling faster turnup for thousands of machines.

“Those metrics reflect the scale of our work and the demand we’re seeing from departments,” Tim said. He told commissioners the county deployed 7,549 PCs in 2025 and supports roughly 50 department technology projects at any one time.

On security, Tim said the county has a full-time IT security staff, performs internal and external penetration tests, runs phishing simulations and bimonthly security-awareness training, and maintains incident-response plans tied to the emergency operations center. He said the county dedicates about 22% of its IT budget to security-related activities—higher than the national average for similarly sized governments—and participates in a local cyber mutual-aid task force with city and municipal partners.

Mary Beth Vanill, the county’s IT deputy director, summarized recent accomplishments including a dedicated IT project manager, expanded OnBase capacity, improved onboarding processes and increased ERP support. She also described the county’s LiDAR (LAR) flight work and said the resulting data layers—used by local planning, engineering firms and the drain commission—are made available on the county’s open-data portal.

Commissioners asked several follow-up questions. Commissioner Bjac confirmed that the OnBase figure refers to pages rather than document counts. Commissioner Grant asked whether ADA compliance applied to public-facing sites; staff said it does and that vendor work was about 58% complete the previous week. Board Chair Green asked for a ballpark of the countywide annual technology investment; Tim estimated roughly $14–$15 million across departments, excluding capital projects.

Several commissioners raised questions about artificial intelligence. Tim said the county has an interdepartmental group that meets regularly to promote AI literacy and coordinate pilots and that the county monitors the technology’s risks and opportunities rather than moving immediately to broad automation.

The committee had no formal votes tied to IT policy in this meeting; commissioners thanked staff and moved on to the next agenda item.