State CIO asks for $60.3M to sustain central IT, expand cybersecurity and scale AI tools

The state's central IT office urged lawmakers to maintain House 2 funding to prevent erosion of enterprise services and to continue investments in cybersecurity, digital accessibility and nascent AI deployments.

Jason Snyder, Commonwealth CIO and Secretary of the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security, said the governor's FY27 request for TSS totals $60.3 million and will support critical functions such as software maintenance, enterprise backups, MassGIS mapping services and the centralized service desk. Snyder described a steady program of vulnerability discovery and remediation through the state SOC, which handled tens of thousands of security events and mitigated hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities in the prior year.

Snyder highlighted statewide digital initiatives: MyMassGov single sign-on (more than 3.3 million resident accounts), a virtual assistant pilot launched for RMV that handled hundreds of thousands of customer queries, an AI sandbox to experiment with generative models in a walled environment, and enterprise data pipelines to speed cross-agency analytics. Snyder also described municipal offerings such as free cybersecurity training licenses and a Cyber Health Check program for cities and towns.

Committee members asked about pen-testing cadence, data-center redundancy and the chargeback model for TSS services; Snyder said the SOC is primarily internal with third-party off-hours support, that pen tests are performed on new applications and that TSS operates a mix of co-located and state-managed data centers with redundancy in Boston, Lowell and Springfield. He said TSS has launched chargeback advisory groups to build transparent, equitable rates for agency customers.

Snyder requested full H2 support for TSS to avoid risks to continuity and security and to preserve the enterprise's ability to deliver shared digital services across the executive branch.