Commentary: FI$Cal CIO Sees More Cloud Tech on Horizon

The following commentary first appeared this week in Focus, the newsletter of the Financial Information System for California. FI$Cal’s chief information officer and deputy director of IT, Kanuri Murty, will be a panelist at Thursday’s State of Technology California Industry Forum in Sacramento.

Our vision at the Department of FISCal (FI$Cal) is to provide world-class customer service, innovative solutions, and efficient system operations as a trusted partner.

As such, FI$Cal’s digital transformation journey continues with a focus on increasing resiliency, strengthening our cybersecurity posture and enhancing digital services to better serve our customers. As part of this ongoing journey, FI$Cal has a cloud-first policy, meaning we look into cloud computing solutions before making any new investments.

Our transition to the cloud enables us to take advantage of the latest advancements in technology to improve the resiliency and provide the flexibility to scale up or down our systems on demand, ensuring they remain agile and available as our computing needs evolve.

FI$Cal has transitioned many of our applications and hardware to cloud solutions to meet on-demand computing capacity needs. For example, in 2021, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, we revamped our disaster recovery system.

FI$Cal is engaged in cloud computing on many levels, and there is still more to do. We will continue our transition to the cloud in a phased manner; currently, we are migrating our key back-office systems and services to the cloud. This will enable our staff to perform their functions through cloud-based virtual private networks and virtual desktops without any downtime.

Then, we will migrate the FI$Cal system to a cloud-based infrastructure, taking the lessons learned from implementing cloud-based non-production and disaster recovery environments and formulating a strategy for migrating the FI$Cal system components to the cloud.

Later, we will determine a feasible strategy to transition our software to a cloud software-as-a-service model and take advantage of the latest advancements in these services to identify a feasible and cost-effective strategy based on the maturity of the cloud solutions at that time.

Streamlining our systems and ensuring we are using the most secure and up-to-date cloud services will help us provide better services for our customers and better support our ongoing efforts, including the onboarding of deferred departments.

Cloud solutions have enabled us to deploy services faster and eliminate the costly and time-consuming burden of procuring, configuring and maintaining hardware, storage and software. We look forward to the ongoing modernization of the system and continue to seek innovative tools to improve the way California does business.