Watch GovExec State & Local’s Cloud Opportunities and Challenges Webcast
Bill Oates, the commonwealth chief information officer in Massachusetts, discussed his experiences with the cloud in Boston and in Massachusetts during a recent GovExec State & Local editorial webcast. Galiptynutz / Shutterstock.com
Connecting state and local government leaders
Massachusetts CIO Bill Oates and Asheville, N.C., Business and Public Technology Manager Scott Barnwell discuss cloud strategies, best practices and case studies.
Just before Thanksgiving, GovExec State & Local hosted an editorial webcast on cloud computing challenges and opportunities for state and local governments featuring Bill Oates, Massachusetts’ commonwealth chief information officer, and Scott Barnwell, the business and public technology manager for the city of Asheville, North Carolina.
Co-moderated by GovExec State & Local Senior Editor Michael Grass and Government Executive Media Group Editorial Events Editor Frank Konkel, the webcast covered a wide range of issues related to cloud, from best practices to deployment strategies to workforce issues to case studies.
The implementation of cloud technology has been incredibly transformational on the state and local level, according to the panelists.
“One thing that cloud has really allowed us to do as a city is just refocus on our core business,” Barnwell said, noting a multi-month process of upgrading Asheville’s financial system which is now in the cloud. “The idea of server configuration doesn’t even come into play. All of that is handled by the provider and allows us to really refocus on what our core business is and bringing real value to our jurisdiction instead of just working on the back-end systems.”
Barnwell discussed how his city deployed its disaster-recovery system into the Amazon Web Services cloud instead of spending city resources on an expensive second data center.
“It’s been highly successful. The costs are much much lower, we’re talking about a magnitude of 80-to-90 percent cost reductions on a disaster-recovery center simply by using cloud technology,” he said.
Oates, whose efforts as chief information officer in the city of Boston and for the commonwealth have been nationally recognized, said a state or local government’s cloud evolution isn’t something that can be accomplished all at once, “it comes in small pieces first.”
In many ways, cloud implementation is more about an IT organization’s leadership and operational adaptation than it is about the cloud technology itself, he said.
“It’s really important for you to start thinking about how does your organization develop the skillset to move from becoming the organization that provisions that server to the organization that is working with the business and working with the the cloud provider whether it’s the software-as-a-service-application provider or something more deeply in the infrastructure in the storage and compute power,” Oates said.
“That’s incredibly valuable as you start down the roadmap of cloud—getting your organization comfortable with it, develop those skills. Again, the IT organization moving forward is going to have to develop more and more of that. . . . We’ve spent a lot of years trying to break down silos that exist between different department and agencies within government. . . . What we don’t want to do is develop new silos with everyone using different cloud services.”