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Conservation CIO Says Migration to Cloud on Target for Mid-Year

The state Department of Conservation is on track to complete its migration to the cloud by mid-year, after which it 'will likely start looking at opportunities to advance and leverage our new cloud-based infrastructure,' CIO Catherine Kendall tells Techwire.

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The California Department of Conservation is continuing its effort to digitize — focusing on new tools and technologies, adapting business processes to work with those tools, and using efficiency and cost reduction to improve service delivery. 

Rather than forcing new tech to fit old systems, the “DOC will likely start looking at opportunities to advance and leverage our new cloud-based infrastructure in the next fiscal year,” Chief Information Officer Catherine Kendall told Techwire in an email.

Following efforts to move from a paper-based office in 2018, the department estimates its cloud migration will be complete by mid-2019.

“With that, our next objective is to ensure that the end-user community is able to take advantage of the new features available in MSO 365 [Microsoft Office 365],” Kendall wrote.

Kendall also explained that for for the past two years, DOC has pursued a sustainable modernization effort to:

• Eliminate technical debt. "We have eliminated over 75 percent of our technical debt since 2016," she said.

• Migrate local/on-premises computing and storage technologies to the commercial Microsoft Azure Cloud through the California Department of Technology.
• Expand the use of MSO 365 tools and technologies available that will allow for improved self-service among DOC end users.
• Modernize custom applications and rebuild them to be Azure cloud-native and/or replace with SaaS and/or COTS where possible.
• Standardize IT skill sets to be interchangeable across multiple applications to mitigate risk of knowledge loss/resource dependence.

"By focusing on sustainable technology," Kendall wrote, "DOC is well positioned to respond to a changing policy and regulatory environment with modern solutions that can be delivered on an accelerated time frame.”

Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.