West Virginia overcomes broadband bottleneck to enter the cloud

The state government of West Virginia is only recently getting its cloud infrastructure on the ground, a development delayed by the mountainous state’s shortage of broadband connectivity.

In a recent video interview, state Chief Information Officer Heather Abbott told StateScoop she’s standing up three cloud environments — hosted by Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft — to begin transitioning various state agencies and county offices to modern software services.

“We have a big desire to move a lot of legacy information off the mainframe, especially things that have just sat there just in case old data is needed,” Abbott said.

She said the state has been installing fiber optic cable where it can, including in its state parks, where there’s a growing expectation from tourists that Wi-Fi is available everywhere.

“But we still have a long way to go, which is part of the reason our cloud efforts are just really now kicking into gear and becoming a big push,” she said. “Because our county offices for different departments now have the ability to have the connectivity to work with systems that are in the cloud, where four or five years ago it wasn’t possible.”