California’s Department of Technology announced changes this week that allow agencies to use pre-existing contracts to speed up infrastructure upgrades.
The state of California is entering what the department calls CalCloud 3.0, made up of a “hybrid community cloud.”
“The other axis is whether you want to do private clouds, on premise, or public clouds like an AWS or Azure, or a hybrid approach,” David Egts, chief technologist for the Public Sector at Red Hat, said in a recent interview with Techwire. “The people in public sector were later adopters of public cloud computing because they had concerns of security.”
CalCloud began acting as a broker of multiple cloud services in CalCloud 2.0.
"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," Scott MacDonald, deputy director of the CalCloud Services Division, said in an October 2016 interview about CalCloud's first version.
This new round of offerings teams the public sector with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, where data can be kept that is nonconfidential. The rest of the information will be kept in the state’s private cloud, which has FedRAMP approval for its Infrastructure as a Service.
The state’s announcement requires agencies to use Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service for all new technology initiatives after evaluating them for security, data classification and privacy impact.
The announcement also states that if existing CDT services are not sufficient for IaaS and PaaS purchase, or if a cloud service is not deemed appropriate, agencies must work with the Department of General Services to find other procurement options.
