Unifying California's agencies onto one integrated budgeting and resource planning system was one of the state's largest undertakings. The Financial Information System for California, Fi$Cal, was meant to streamline revenue and expenditure tracking for the state of California, so security while enrolling departments successfully was fundamental.
"System security is our top priority," said Amy Norris, strategic communications manager for the department. "We perform security monitoring and analysis in our daily operations through manual and automated processes. We look for suspicious activities in the FI$Cal system and its components using third party and in-system tools."
Some 15,000 people will eventually use the system over on-premise and virtual systems for procurement and budgeting processes.
Accenture was originally chosen to handle the system's security, but now the department has almost completely transitioned to handling it. The IT Division put together a security initiative road map that included several years of improvement.
"The road map plan includes enhancing security data analytics programs and tools, and formalizing more advanced fraud detection processes," Norris told Techwire. "We will be recruiting new technical staff and contractors to assist in this effort."
In 2017, the department CIO, Subbarao Mupparaju, discussed the efforts the department would handle. They included encryption, IP filtering and access management.
“You have to think security even more carefully," Mupparaju said, "right from the time you are architecting systems.”
