FI$Cal CIO Kanuri Murty Gives Update on Agency Progress

Things at the Financial Information System of California (FI$Cal) are headed in a positive direction, according to an update offered last week by CIO and Deputy Director of IT Kanuri Murty.

The Financial Information System for California was the state’s answer to its disparate, legacy financial systems. The department aims to consolidate and modernize finances into one system for “budgeting, procurement, cash management, and accounting functions.”

In a blog post Friday, Murty highlighted some of the department’s efforts over the last year, namely hardware and software updates, security enhancements, and a push into the cloud.

“We continue to make progress to ensure the technology supports system users and ensures the system will remain modern and secure into the future,” he wrote.

Murty noted the department’s adherence to the Cal-Secure framework where cybersecurity is concerned. In addition to enhancing asset tracking and monitoring with the Tanium platform, the department has also implemented multifactor authentication for the “PeopleSoft accounting application, budgeting application, and reporting solution.”

“Securing the FI$Cal applications and infrastructure is a top priority, and we continuously look for opportunities to improve our security posture,” he wrote.

The move to the cloud is still underway, with the first phase of the migration of back-office systems and services complete. The department will now turn its attention to migrating “non-production environments to the cloud,” Murty wrote.

“This will be a longer-term initiative, and will require architecting the cloud infrastructure, securing it, and migrating non-critical workloads first, before planning the migration of critical workloads,” he wrote. “In order to minimize the risks and optimize the costs of such a transition, we intend to follow the learn-mature-and-operationalize model.”

Murty also noted that Open FI$Cal, the clearinghouse for public expenditure data, has been migrated to a new Microsoft PowerBI platform to “streamline internal operations” and “improve accessibility.”