Los Angeles County's Internal Services Department has been moving county departments to an off-premises data center and migrating to a hybrid cloud architecture.
The county is finalizing master service agreements (MSA) for Amazon and IBM cloud services for an early 2019 launch. Google and Azure MSAs are expected in early 2019. One reason for the direct agreements is to align the private cloud offerings with L.A. County's security parameters.
Departments can choose which cloud services best fit their needs by comparing them on the county's cloud center, a comparison shopping platform.
The county is also offering its own public cloud services in its new data center. The Internal Services Department (ISD) moved over to the new data center in 2018, and now the rest of the county is following.
"They're all in a certain place on the migration conveyor belt," said Tony Cronin, senior IT specialist in the county's Computing Services Branch.
The migration process includes several phases discovery, inventory, analysis on bandwidth and application mapping, then scheduling the actual migration.
Using cloud services has allowed the county to use virtualization and containers to spin up apps and websites faster than before. ISD can use "templates that are used to deploy databases or applications" that are pre-made with the county's security infrastructure "baked into it," according to Jac Fagundo, deputy director of the Computing Services Branch.
The new data center serves 480 websites, more than 600 databases and almost 3,000 virtual servers.
