Wrapping Up the State Legislative Session With Heath Beach

The 2023 Florida legislative session left a mark on IT plans and initiatives, including cybersecurity, app modernization and cloud migration.

To help explain what happened, Industry Insider — Florida interviewed Heath Beach, co-founder and CEO of Avail Strategies. Prior to this role, Beach served as the state's deputy CIO and as acting CIO, overseeing the state's data center, network, public safety communications, telephone services and more.

One of Beach's biggest takeaways was the local cybersecurity grant program, for which the Legislature allocated $40 million this year. Of the state's 67 counties, 66 benefited from it, showing that cybersecurity is no longer being viewed as an expense, but a necessity — especially in the post-COVID era.

Another hot topic was app modernization and cloud migration, which lawmakers funded to the tune of $163 million. As he noted, this is not an easy task, especially because there are several large legacy modernization projects taking place and hundreds more applications needing modernization. Moving to the cloud promises major benefits, including emerging technology such as AI.

Beach said companies interested in working with the state and signing contracts should take into consideration that “there is no centralized IT operation, nor is it completely 100 percent decentralized." In other words, depending on what a vendor wants, it could benefit from being on multiple contracts, or only a few. Regardless, whether it's through cybersecurity, app modernization or cloud migration there are multiple avenues vendors can take to acquire an IT contract.