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State Looks Ahead to 'CalCloud 3.0'

California's private cloud is little more than two years old, but state officials are already looking ahead to its third iteration. A hybrid cloud appears to be part of future plans.

California's private cloud is little more than two years old, but state officials are already looking ahead to its third iteration.

Core tenets of "CalCloud 3.0" will be to move the offering toward a "hybrid community cloud" model and have state staff take on more responsibility over support of the system, said Scott MacDonald, deputy director of the CalCloud Services Division.

The hybrid cloud model, MacDonald said, will blend features of the less expensive public cloud — where nonconfidential data can be stored — and the on-premise private cloud that has the requisite security for the state's sensitive data and mission-critical systems.

"What we're trying to do is take the best of both worlds and really bring them together to really cause some efficiencies for the state and our customers," MacDonald said.

In 2017, CalCloud likely will add a range of new features, such as more "X-as-a-service" offerings, supporting "container" environments for DevOps and agile development, and security monitoring and integration with California's new Cybersecurity Integration Center that opened this year (see slide on the left).

"One of things we're really looking at and expanding upon is really more about high availability between data centers. ... Our customers are looking more at real-time failover between the data centers," MacDonald. He said CDT is re-architecting its data center to provide that capability for zero downtime.

CalCloud originally launched in summer 2014. Its reception was mixed among some vendors, given that IBM was the primary provider of the "infrastructure as a service" offering with the state data center. Adoption by state customers was also slow at the beginning.

With that feedback in hand, last year the Department of Technology repositioned and expanded its enterprise strategy for CalCloud, to act as a broker of different cloud services offered by multiple cloud providers in areas such as platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS). The department also slashed rates by as much as 50 percent. Those changes came to be known as CalCloud 2.0.

Chris Cruz, the Department of Technology's chief deputy director of operations, summarized the evolution the past two years:

"CalCloud 1.0 was really about standing up infrastructure as a service on-prem a couple of years ago. We had another revision last year called Called 2.0, which talked about adding some additional services and enhancements to that particular effort with IBM. And CalCloud 3.0 really is moving us in another direction of being more vendor agnostic and being really a hybrid cloud service provider moving forward," Cruz said Monday.

Matt Williams was Managing Editor of Techwire from June 2014 through May 2017.