NASCIO Awards

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

2010 Awards: Enterprise IT Management Initiatives

RECIPIENT:
Utah - Creating Utah's Cloud Infrastructure

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Faced with budgetary challenges, the Utah Department of Technology Services (DTS) and the Utah Legislature agreed to find a way to reduce the state’s technology budget by $4 million. At the same time, a growing number of local governments, facing the same challenges, approached the state about less expensive ways to securely deliver an increasingly complex array of digital services.

Although Utah’s IT personnel had been consolidated into a single department, servers and data center functions remained scattered across 38 separate locations. This led to costly support, high utility costs, and inconsistent standards for hosting services. The concept of a computing cloud offered the potential to simplify and add value in new and useful ways.

In August 2009, Utah CIO Steve Fletcher announced that the state of Utah was preparing a private cloud that would deliver “hosted email and web applications” to cities and counties within the state. In fact, Utah’s cloud strategy has its roots long before that time and the strategy is much deeper.

In 2005, the state had consolidated its technology assets into a single department, moving all state IT personal under the state chief information officer. The legislature also required that all IT contracts be managed through DTS. In 2007, the CIO created the Architecture Review Board as a mechanism for developing and approving statewide technology standards. With the announcement that Utah would begin developing cloud services, a strategic cloud plan was developed and approved by the Architecture Review Board.

In order to achieve its overall vision for cloud computing, Utah needed to accomplish three things:

Change the IT culture to accept a new type of computing environment
Implement a highly available, highly scalable computing platform to support private cloud services
Initiate a process for identifying, selecting, and contracting for public cloud services

DTS is meeting these objectives by consolidating data centers, virtualizing servers, and preparing a cloud platform that meets the demands of swift provisioning required by Utah government.

“The Data Center Consolidation Initiative and the creation of a Cloud Infrastructure has provided an enterprise-wide solution for Utah’s technological needs. Utah has been able to reduce the number of data centers and servers, increase security and performance, save the state $4 million annually ongoing, and opened the door to provide additional secure services to our local government partners.”
Kenneth Petersen, Chief Operating Officer, Department of Technology Services, State of Utah

FINALISTS:
Click on the title to download program submission.

Michigan
Michigan Business One-Stop

Tennessee
The Virtual State of Tennessee

OTHER NOMINATIONS:
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California
Driving Business Value through Integrated IT Governance

Colorado
Transforming IT in Colorado Government

District of Columbia
IT Staff Augmentation

Georgia
Georgia Enterprise Technology Services

Minnesota
Minnesota iGov

North Carolina
Managing Risk in the Information Technology Enterprise

Ohio
Shared Services Transforms Ohio Government into High Performance Administration

Oklahoma
Information Technology and Telecommunication Application