Last month the Department of General Services (DGS) successfully migrated 3,500 mail boxes to the California Email Service (CES), a Cloud software solution. This was the first large State Department to migrate under AB 2408 (Smyth/2010). The legislation consolidates state information technology functions under the Office of the State Chief Information Officer and required all executive branch state departments under the Governor’s control to consolidate e-mail systems, servers and networks to reduce redundancy, save energy and streamline delivery of IT services. It requires the consolidation of 130 separate e-mail systems, all with their own hardware, software licenses and maintenance requirements into just two systems: CA MAIL offered by the State Office of Technology Services and CES offered by a private Cloud vendor (CSC) utilizing the Microsoft Exchange platform. It took one year to build the service for the state and some departments have more pre-migration planning and remedial work to do in order to consume the service, but the recent successful migration of 3,500 e-mail boxes at DGS to the Cloud is a major milestone in the implementation of AB 2408. "We fully support the vision in the state’s 2012 IT Strategic Plan and the recent DGS migration to CES has demonstrated the promise cloud computing offers" – Andrew Armani, Agency Information Officer of the California State and Consumer Services Agency. Several smaller departments have also migrated to CES including the Contractor State Licensing and Medical Boards which were the first organizations to use the Cloud service. Since AB 2408 was enacted, ninety percent of all state departments have elected to use CES for their departmental e-mail service and when fully implemented, 66 state departments and over 100,000 state mail boxes will utilize CES for email, making it one of the largest Cloud email systems in government today.
