Residents with urgent first responder and health issues have gained more resilient access to California websites and services as a result of the state’s work with Folsom-based IT consulting and software development company Tek Yantra. And the rise in service level has in turn empowered the state’s higher-level examination of what IT work with its more than 130 entities will look like in the future. Among the takeaways:
- Tek Yantra’s work with the state has enabled health entities and public safety agencies like the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) to achieve the resiliency they need to adequately respond to extreme moments of demand and high visitor levels as residents seek information on COVID-19 and wildfire spread — two areas of inquiry that have led to millions of simultaneous inquiries to state sites. The company’s work with the state helped stand up an infrastructure, support developers to provision that environment, “and get the application running in record time,” Tek Yantra Technology Director Sreekar Peddi told Techwire recently, noting the app used less feedback loop data and was able to support millions of simultaneous users with zero downtime.
- With this project and others, Peddi said, Tek Yantra helped the state and particularly the California Department of Technology (CDT) “in building up an entire ecosystem.” Within CDT, and especially its Office of Enterprise Technology, he explained, the company helped provide “the things that are needed to deliver the business requirements” coming from the state’s many different entities. Building in agile, he said, helped create a new culture and way of doing things. Per his LinkedIn profile, Peddi has worked for CDT under contract since 2019 as a consulting cloud security and infrastructure architect.
- Projects including public safety power shutoff events, standing up infrastructure at PG&E and the development of a single system around the state’s efforts to license and monitor cannabis were thusly made easier, Conrad Long, CDT veteran and its DevSecOps manager, told Techwire — as is COVID-19 contact tracing. And a culture change is underway: State technology officials work to make most solutions they build “open source to other state departments and even other states,” Long said. That includes California’s contact tracing solution, which it has shared with other states.
“That’s really our paradigm here — not only are we developing things, but we’re developing it in a way that then we can provide it as open source so that other public-sector entities can take advantage of that. We’re not working in isolation,” Long said. - Governance, oversight and compliance have been further enabled, he said, by an increasingly agile culture and by solutions that simply work as advertised. The next step for the state, Long said, will be to evolve that technology, its compliance and security, to be built “in a way that it’s so minute it’s transparent to our customers,” thereby building in compliance for security and stability, and sustainability.
“I’m using that as an example, but our developers don’t even see that. The application architects do but the others just say ‘You’re making my life better.’ And now they push code, it goes to where it’s appropriate. And it’s transparent to them,” Long said. “So, we can talk about which solutions we’re working on today. But every time we do a new solution, we learn something new and then we incorporate that, we bake it into the standard. And then it gets put on every other thing that we do.”
