State of Utah (Department of Technology Services)

Project: Cloud Computing Services

The State of Utah began an effort to standardize and unify its IT services in 2005 when it merged its technology assets into a single department, moving all IT staff under the state Chief Information Officer. To develop a suitable cloud strategy, the State needed to fulfill specific security requirements unique to the State. If these security challenges were met, Utah could take advantage of an array of cloud benefits including elastic expansion of services, rapidly provisioned computing capabilities, and shared services across multiple users and platforms based on customer demand.

After a wave of data center consolidation, in 2009 Utah decided that a hybrid cloud approach would work best for the State’s needs. A hybrid approach combines access to public cloud services that add to or replace existing state infrastructure with private cloud services meeting specialized access and security requirements. This cloud environment includes services hosted both by third-party providers and in-state data centers.

The move to cloud-based solutions has benefited local public sector actors across the state. Although many of the public cloud provisioned services are free, the State of Utah also supports a growing number of paid services where individual county and city governments pay only for their usage. These currently include Force.com for Customer Relationship Management, Google Earth Professional for shared Geographic Information System (GIS) planning, and Wikispaces where there are an increasing number of self-provisioned wikis. Contracts for these services are centrally managed through the Department of Technology Services (DTS) and make it easy for agencies to use.

Having provided its agencies and local governments with centralized access to the public cloud, the State of Utah is now focused on completing its private cloud. The State’s applications previously resided on about 1,800 physical servers in over 35 locations. By December 2010, the State plans to move these applications to a virtual platform of 400 servers. This initiative is currently over 70 percent complete and is expected to save $4 million in annual costs for a state IT budget of only $150 million. Going forward, DTS plans to extend virtualization to desktops across the state.

By implementing a vast strategy for migrating services to the cloud, the State has created an enterprise where public or private services can be reused and provisioned on demand to meet agency needs as cost-effectively as possible. This effort has had an immediate impact on State agencies and is expected to result in significant future savings.