The California Department of Technology on Thursday morning officially unveiled CalCloud, a new service that IBM is managing within the state’s data center.
The system is California’s answer to increasing demand for cloud computing infrastructure among government users. Officials said the delivery model — hosted in a secure state facility and operated by a vendor — is unique in the state government market.
"Today is an opportunity for government, especially California government, to start changing the dialog around technology — not only technology in government, but the state’s ability to deliver, the state’s capability to do procurement, and the state’s ability to partner with the private sector," said California state CIO Carlos Ramos, at a kickoff event in front of hundreds at the California State Lottery’s headquarters building north of downtown Sacramento.
More than 20 government customers have signed up as tenants so far and the state expects more to join as time goes on. State agencies, local governments, and education institutions can choose to purchase bundled packages of servers, storage, backup, disaster recovery and more from CalCloud.
This "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) can be modified remotely by the customer and rapidly provisioned in just a matter of hours, via a self-service web portal.
George Cruser, IBM’s public-sector general manager of global technology services, said CalCloud will continue to be updated and modernized during the life of the company’s five-year contract with the state.
"What we’re hoping to provide in CalCloud is an infrastructure that’s at the ready and available on-demand so you can spend your time and energy building the kind of applications that citizens need," Cruser said.
Ron Hughes, the Department of Technology’s outgoing chief deputy, said it’s unique that IBM is providing the CalCloud infrastructure at no upfront cost to California and will only make revenue as tenant users are charged fees for the service.
IBM personnel will manage CalCloud, and the contract requires them to provide training to the state’s staff at the Office of Technology Services (OTech). The idea is that the state will be able to run the cloud on its own someday.
Security was one of the deciding factors that swayed California to keep CalCloud within its state data center instead of allowing it to go offsite. Hughes said CalCloud adheres to all major state and federal data security standards, including FedRAMP; NIST; and CJIS, the FBI’s information security standard.
This was a really complex project. We’re the first state to use this [public-private] approach and we’re certainly the first state to do it on this scale," Hughes said. "&hellip In some ways the technology was the easy part. We’ve really had to change our policies and procedures. We’ve had to build interfaces to our billing system, service catalog, help desk, ticketing catalog. It really has been a huge organizational change."
Despite the complexity, Ramos noted that CalCloud took only eight months from the RFP to an executed contract, showcasing the state’s efforts at implementing a new procurement model.
