IT department staff told the Budget & Finance Committee that the city will see “significant” recurring cost increases in 2026 as cloud hosting, anti‑spam and mailbox‑backup services move from partial to full production.

Randy (IT department staff) said the city’s hybrid approach — a mix of on‑premises systems and cloud services — is now realizing costs the department budgeted only partially in 2025. He said the mailbox migration to Microsoft Exchange Online finished mid‑year and that the city expects about 475 mailboxes to be hosted in the cloud in 2026. Randy said the department recently migrated anti‑spam services from Symantec to Mimecast and moved archiving and mailbox backups off‑premises, and those ongoing transfers and licensing fees are a major driver of the software maintenance increase.

Jim Franks (IT department staff) expanded the case for added networking and redundancy, saying the shift to cloud‑based records management and computer‑aided dispatch systems for police and fire makes always‑available connectivity essential for 911 and other emergency services. He said the city is designing redundant Internet circuits and site failover so that if one provider (he cited AT&T as an example) fails, alternate links such as Crown Castle can carry traffic.

Randy told the committee that many cloud services are billed month‑to‑month rather than annually, which means failing to preserve dedicated budget lines could trigger service interruptions. "If the bill doesn't get paid within a month, the service will be shut off," he said, stressing that funds earmarked for cloud services must be maintained to avoid immediate outages for email, anti‑spam and backups.

Staff also raised cybersecurity and training as a growing line‑item. Jim said moving critical data to third‑party cloud platforms requires additional automated controls, licensing layers and user training to reduce the risk of incidents and to screen out malicious activity before it escalates.

Legacy workstation support was another budget pressure. Randy and Jim said roughly 70 city computers still run Windows 10 while the department replaces about 30 machines per year. Microsoft declared Windows 10 at end of life last October, the staff said; they warned that unpatched endpoints increase exposure even when other defensive layers are in place. Randy said the normal refresh cadence will not immediately eliminate Windows 10 devices because some departments run legacy applications that do not function on newer operating systems and vendors have been slow to update older products.

Committee members asked about options such as running legacy applications inside virtual machines. Jim said virtualization can help in some cases, but licensing costs, functional limits and the age of some vendor software can make VM solutions impractical.

The department proposed using capital outlay and unspent hardware funds where possible to accelerate replacement of end‑user devices and said they are estimating additional computer purchases; specific dollar totals discussed by staff were given in the meeting’s presentation and attributed to the IT staff but are not fully specified in the public transcript.

Committee members did not take a formal vote; staff said draft budget figures will be included in the next committee budget packet for further review.