The California Department of Technology and IBM have announced CalCloud, a cloud hosting based technology model to build and deliver more innovative government services and savings. The platform, now available to municipalities and all state and local government agencies on a subscription basis, would be the first of its kind to be implemented in the U.S. at the state level.
Instead of separate IT systems for each department, IBM’s CalCloud service model allows government entities to share a common pool of cloud hosting based resources and operate more efficiently than they do today. Immediate access to modern back-end services frees up state department to focus on projects with direct impact on the public.
California’s move to offer shared IT services through CalCloud would provide state and local government the ability to buy only the computing resources needed with the flexibility to quickly scale up or scale down resources as workloads demand.
“CalCloud is an important step towards providing faster and more cost effective IT services to California state departments and ultimately to the citizens of California,” said Marybel Batjer, Secretary of the Government Operations Agency.
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Security standards
CalCloud is designed to allow around the clock access to the shared pool of “easily configurable” resources including compute, storage, network and disaster recovery services. CalCloud would meet stringent security standards based on National Institute of Standards (NIST) for cloud hosting based services and FedRAMP.
More than 20 state departments have already requested IT services through CalCloud.
As part of this public-private partnership, IBM is supplying and managing the cloud hosting services infrastructure, while the California Department of Technology will manage all other aspects of the service offering. Additionally, IBM will work closely with the state to transfer essential knowledge and best practices in security and systems integration to the Department of Technology.
In addition to IBM, CalCloud partners include AT&T, which will provide network services for the core and edge networks, and IT consulting firms Alexan International, Inc., and KPMG, LLC to drive CalCloud’s adoption rate and migration to the new cloud hosting based service.
