While California has made great strides in cloud computing since its 2013 cloud-first policy release, the state technology department’s chief technology officer says more work on modernization is needed.
On an episode of StateScoop’s Priorities podcast, California Department of Technology Chief Technology Officer Richard Rogers says the state needs to consider a modernization strategy to update legacy systems in order to make cloud adoption a reality.
“There needs to be a significant statewide modernization strategy that needs to precede and make cloud adoption successful so that the next generation of citizen self services is the cornerstone of California’s government service delivery and enterprise cloud services,” Rogers says.
Rogers also called the state’s cloud evolution “very slow” due to the size and complexity of the state’s enterprise systems — many of which still operate on legacy mainframe software components.
Speed notwithstanding, the state’s technology agency has been advancing cloud projects beyond the evolution of brokering cloud services for state agencies. Rogers says the state is working on implementations of Service Now, Red Hat Ansible and Red Hat OpenShift. Those implementations “better position CDT in a leadership position in terms of cloud migration, cloud management and cloud operations,” he says.
In the process of upgrading the department’s own cloud services and brokering others for state agencies, the state has modernized and upgrade its statewide wide area network.
“We are modernizing … to ensure our customers are able to obtain their required bandwidth they need to leverage more cloud services at a much more effective rate,” Rogers says.
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Priorities is StateScoop’s podcast chronicling the top 10 priorities of state chief information officers. The show is based on the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ annual list of top 10 priorities, and produced in partnership with the association.