California Looks to CalCloud for Gov IT in the Cloud

The California Department of Technology and IBM introduced CalCloud, a public-private partnership aimed at migrating government services into the cloud.

IBM is supplying and managing the infrastructure, while the California Department of Technology will manage all other aspects of the service offering. 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 and KPMG will help drive CalCloud’s adoption rate and migration to the new service.

More than 20 state departments have already requested IT services through CalCloud, which uses security standards based on National Institute of Standards (NIST) for cloud based services and FedRAMP.

The California Department of Technology said the main benefit of CalCloud will be to give 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.

“Transforming how the State of California delivers technology services is not only more efficient and cost effective, it will spur innovation with cloud capabilities that are open and secure,” said Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services. “California is setting an example for other states on how to use cloud technology to improve coordination across agencies and municipalities while reducing the barriers and duplication that can impede the delivery of government services.”

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44436.wss
http://servicecatalog.otech.ca.gov/services/cloud/calcloud/docs/CalCloudBrochure.pdf
http://servicecatalog.otech.ca.gov/