Kansas Bolsters Cybersecurity With New Shared Services Model
Kansas Bolsters Cybersecurity With New Shared Services Model
https://www.govtech.com/security/kansas-bolsters-cybersecurity-with-new-shared-services-model
Publish Date: 2026-05-06 16:53:00
Source Domain: www.govtech.com
Kansas is now offering shared IT and cybersecurity services to its local governments, public schools, hospitals and nonprofits, potentially creating an economy of scale that will lower costs for the state as well, said Kansas Chief IT Officer Jeff Maxon.
This comes after the passage and signing in April of two key pieces of legislation that expand state tech support and oversight in different ways. The first is Senate Bill 51, which formally lets the state’s Office of Information Technology Services (OITS) provide IT and cybersecurity services to cities, counties, schools, hospitals and nonprofits. The state will use a chargeback model, which means recipients pay for services rendered, rather than for tech support in perpetuity. The second is House Bill 2574, which requires new ongoing cybersecurity assessments and maturity reporting within the state government itself, while also giving the state’s chief information security officer more flexibility to set security standards across agencies as threats continue to rapidly evolve.
SB 51 “allows us to build our own economies of scale, so we can hopefully reduce costs not just for local governments but for the state,” Maxon said. “It also increases visibility into what’s going on across the state, so we know how to better defend and where to allocate resources.”
Under previous law, Maxon said that reporting requirements existed, but they didn’t provide a complete picture. As this model grows, it will provide more insight into things like local cybersecurity-related outages, and it is expected to bring more consistency to cloud adoption as OITS provides direct services.
While leaders cannot predict how quickly local entities will adopt the program, they want small and rural communities to know help is now available. Maxon said the state will also continue encouraging communities to partner with one another, as they do in traditional emergency…
