Moving state IT to Microsoft’s Cloud for Government
The opportunities and challenges facing government agencies today are vast, spanning the spectrum from the explosion of citizen services to the very real compliance issues that all agencies must fact. Yet, it’s truly the potential of the cloud that is driving alignment with even though toughest compliance rules surrounding it. That’s why major governments across the U.S. are modernizing their IT operations with Microsoft Cloud for Government. Texas has deployed more than 110,000 seats of Office 365 Government, which allows its many agencies to collaborate more efficiently and cost-effectively. Alabama is implementing Office 365 Government for 23,000 employees while expanding its infrastructure and platform cloud services though Azure Government and hybrid cloud capabilities.
Brunson White, secretary of technology at State of Alabama, Chris Mankle, CTO and vice president of Innovation for Xerox Services for the State of Texas, and Dale Richardson, director at State of Texas Datacenter Services, have helped lead these efforts in their states and answered a few questions for us to detail how they are making the transition.
What made you decide to move operations to the cloud? Were you trying to solve specific pain points?
Brunson White, Alabama: The cloud is a good fit for state government because it solves a lot of problems. Government tends to run a lot of hardware to end of life, which is a bad strategy. If we can operationalize everything we do and move away from that model, we can deliver excellence in IT across cycles. It also gives us a better time to deployment. It lets us offload a variety of support and compliance issues that we as an industry can’t prioritize because we don’t have the funds. State government spends about 2 percent on IT, which is among the lowest spending in any industry. So, we have to work extra hard to move off of antiquated hardware and unsupported software. Cloud takes all of that off the table, so we can focus on the business of government.
Dale Richardson, Texas: We moved from a fully hosted, on-premises, private community to a hybrid cloud environment. Certain workloads don’t need to be fully managed or hosted on-premises, and next-generation capabilities allow our customers to access compute on an as-needed basis to meet their specific requirements. We wanted to be able to leverage the cloud, specifically Microsoft because it meets all the data privacy issues that the State of Texas cares about.
What attracted you to Microsoft? Did you look at other providers?
Brunson White, Alabama: First, our infrastructure right now in state government is largely Mainframe and Wintel. It makes a lot of sense to go with Microsoft because the vast majority of our computing is Windows virtualized servers. We’ve also looked at the pricing for other cloud providers, and we think Microsoft has a competitive advantage. Our first foray into cloud was moving our email to the cloud. The new workloads we are moving now represent a logical extension of that, as well as an extension of our partnership with Microsoft.
Part of my job is trying to get the entire state of Alabama to act like one organization. That’s hard. There are over 160 different agencies working under the executive branch, and most of them are small. But as we become more like one organization, we become more productive and more efficient. So many things can be done at a policy level. Thus, since we will have servers in the Azure cloud, I don’t have to worry about replacement cycles, or versioning or patching.
Chris Mankle, Texas: Our partnership with Microsoft is logical in part because 60 to 70 percent of our user base is Microsoft-based. We don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution, yet we truly want to choose the right mix and match of products for our needs. It’s the evolution of IT: logical datacenter services. But we don’t want to throw too much at our agencies too fast. By taking baby steps and moving up the stack, starting with Office 365, then storage, then virtual compute, more and more people can get comfortable with the cloud, so it eventually becomes invisible to users.
What improvements and benefits have you seen by using the cloud?
Brunson White, Alabama: People expressed concerns about security in the early days of cloud. The rubber meets the road here, in key areas such as compliance with IRS 1075. Some agencies also have to deal with FedRAMP or HIPAA or myriad other financial regulations. A lot of the money we spend is federal money with strings tied to it, and we have to comply with all of the federal government’s security parameters as well. Microsoft’s Azure Government deals with all that for us. As I noted earlier, if we are struggling to fund the complex compliance in all of these areas, by acquiring cloud computing with that capability built into it, we are far better off, from a management and cost perspective. We’ve also established our agreements with Microsoft specifically for Office 365 to begin the consolidation of our executive-level agencies onto one email service. That sort of consolidation alone is proving to be efficient and cost effective. Also, I don’t have to worry about hardware and licensing or keeping everything up to date. With Office 365, I’m always compliant.
Chris Mankle, Texas: By using the cloud, we now have flexibility when looking at our development options. We can choose whether it resides on- or off-premises based on requirements and seasonality. And we can extend our datacenter services to be logical rather than physical. It’s a service that we can provision based on our users’ needs.
How does this benefit the various state agencies, and how does this impact your constituents in the state?
Brunson White, Alabama: We’re starting off by deploying software in health and science services, where the challenge is speed to market and trying to keep up. Alabama has about 4.8 million people, and close to 1 million are on Medicaid. It’s a huge cost for Alabama, $6.1 billion goes into Medicaid here. We need the right infrastructure to focus on managing eligibility, enrollment and compliance.
Moving to the cloud is also quite beneficial for our citizens at large, not solely the people in Medicaid. We can reduce the cost for the citizens who are paying into the system, and ensure that we’re meeting the health and management needs of those who are benefiting from the system. It goes both ways.
Chris Mankle, Texas: We’ve refined what datacenter services mean in Texas and we expect it to continue to expand in terms of the many workloads we can bring online to continuously improve services. Folding Azure Government into these services allows agencies to use a platform they trust at the price point they want.
