Listen as industry leaders discuss the use of Big Data in business intelligence and analytics, the impact of collaboration technologies on data proliferation and management, and the emergence of data-driven citizen services in the wake of the pandemic.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Google and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around legacy modernization upgrade to citizen centric digital services. In the third panel in the series, Jane Norris, contributing editor for FedInsider sits down with Google's Alexis Bonnell and Maria Zuliani to discuss the death of the legacy system.
Jane Norris: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Jane Norris, and I'll be moderating todays timely, interesting discussion about citizen centric digital services day three in our series. This is about how state and local governments are modernizing their legacy systems to improve data agility, interoperability, collaboration and sustainability. Leaders in government understand that technology is no longer just a back office function. Instead, it has become the virtual face of government, federal, state and local governments are all increasingly interested in modernizing their services. Today with our knowledgeable and experienced guests will discuss some of the strategies that state and local governments are using to design new technology systems that get beyond legacy systems to meet increased man and reduce maintenance and operational costs. So for these topics, we have amazingly talented guests with us today to help break it all down. So let me introduce them so we can get started. First, let me introduce Alexis Brunel. She is the strategic business executive at Google. She serves as a key spokesperson and innovation evangelist across the industry, driving innovation and modernization. Before joining Google, she was the Chief Innovation Officer at USA ID. Alexis had the privilege of working with 1000s of innovators inside and outside of USA ID who are changing the world and helping millions of people become self-reliant. She previously served as the chief of applied innovation and acceleration in the US Global Development Lab of USA ID. This is one of the premier innovation labs in the development industry. And she helped created in 2014. Alexis is a pleasure to talk with you today. Tell us about your role at Google.
Alexis Bonnell: Thank you. And thanks so much for having me. And really my role is so awesome. It's really to just help demystify the technology and help public servants navigate what elements of their mission they can address with technology and advanced technology. Thanks so much for having me.
Jane Norris: Absolutely. Also with us today, we are happy to have Maria Zuliani. Maria is a customer engineer for Google Cloud, state and local governments supporting the Midwest and Northeast sales teams. Previously, she worked at Oracle where she expanded on her expertise in building infrastructures supporting large Oracle Database environments, including SAP. Now while at Oracle, she specialized in core database technologies such as clustering and replication and database security. Before that, Maria worked for Fortune 500 companies where she focused on the Sun Microsystems platform for disaster recovery, backups, and business continuity. She also spoke publicly on storage administration strategies. So please tell us about your role with Google Maria.
Maria Zuliani: Hi, Jane. And first, I want to start off by saying thanks for having me on today for such an exciting topic here at Google Cloud, what I work on is working closely with state and local governments to basically solve their complex business and technology problems, but to modernize and transform legacy systems, so they provide value to constituents in the communities they serve.
Jane Norris: That is great. And I know that both of you have so much to share today. So let's get started and begin our discussion about legacy systems modernization. Now, that's a topic that public and private organizations are both addressing, as well as the federal government. So let's talk about legacy systems specifically for state and local organizations. What are the major challenges facing those governments in modernizing their legacy systems? Alexis?
Alexis Bonnell: Yeah, sure. Jane, I think one of my favorite parts of my job is really being able to talk with public servants and explore again, how tech might solve their challenge or leverage an opportunity. And I think this week already, we've heard so many great insights from Tech leaders around government and I think the way I would collect those conversations and many of the others that Maria and I get have with IT leaders around the country is kind of eight major themes. So for those of you who like less, I'm going to give one to you now. So I think the first thing we're hearing a lot about is really how to move from a legacy system to a living system. And that's really a lot about data and system agility. The second is around interoperability, this idea of moving to multi tool environments, how are you interoperable? How do we in essence, make everyone’s, like easier to use the tools that are best for them. The third, of course, would be, I'd be remiss to not mention, and that's security and also continuity. You know, what we're seeing is that a lot of the recent hacks are driving leaders to ask, what's my backup plan? What are my alternatives, and it's like really level of discomfort with the idea of the patch, if you will, as the best way to handle issues, you know, in the near future, it's also driving a lot of conversation on this topic around Zero Trust. The fourth is that, you know, if we think about moving from a living to Central legacy system, we also have to think about what are new financial models procurement models that keep up with that. This might mean moving away from things like vendor lock ins or contracts, where your compute spend, and so potential black box. But it might also mean thinking about creating technology environments, if you will, versus maintaining systems. This one that we're seeing, which is really exciting is this idea of a data Domino. And so what that really means is that as public servants and leaders and program leaders are getting more timely information, more data, it really means they're having a broader remit to apply that technology and to see value. So as an example, during COVID, we saw an agency that might be dealing with scaling unemployment benefits, to then realizing that they could engage their citizens more with citizen sentiment, or even look at potentially looking at those same payments to ensure that they were proper and not fraudulent. So this idea of once you kind of start, you have this Domino of different ways you can use the tech. The sixth is, again, we've seen a wholesale shift from a desire on public service to be going from being reactive to being data proactive, and the expectations around being able to forecast or have predictive modeling. You know, the seventh is really the idea and this shift around expectations from both staff constituents, you know, that systems will actually talk to each other, that they'll work well together. So as an example, you know, does your email system work with your CMS system, etc. And the final one, and won't be a surprise to anyone, but we are seeing a real awareness around this idea of sustainability, realizing that technology also needs to be sustainably approached. And I think, you know, a bonus conversation, if you will, if I could add a mystery ninth one in there is how do you structure as we think about emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence, or machine learning? How does the public circuit really structure the right governance structures around these emerging technologies? So to me, those are kind of the eight plus bonus, you know, issues that we're really seeing at the heart of many conversations.
Jane Norris: Alexis, I love the way you've broken that down into easy to understand areas of organization. That's great information. So let me ask you, Maria, what's driving the need for a fresh look at legacy systems? Is it new business models that clients are after or new citizen demands or something else?
Maria Zuliani: Well, I want to answer that based on the analogies that I heard earlier this week from James L. Kirk, from the city of Raleigh on Monday. So he was describing the video of grandmother out walking in Great Dane on the leash and she throws out the bone. So the dog takes off and she goes horizontal. He then talked about how states are sometimes pulling the counties along, whereas it other times the needs of the cities and the counties are pushing the state demands. So sometimes we see the refresh of legacy systems being pulled along by the business needs to be more agile to meet more citizen benefits, where we see the push for more capacity and better performance driving those demands. In either case, I've been on the driving factor for change what I've managed legacy systems in the data center. I bet in their place, with the CIO calling for updates every minute, you're looking to ask where's the next update coming. We're losing millions of dollars an hour, and we're past our planned downtime. I've also been the recipient of compliments receipt II o thanking my team for enabling the business to innovate for the first time. I've always drawn in those kinds of experiences when I try to help others. But during the pandemic, we saw capacity expand to handle entire state populations, for a record number of citizens applying for social services at record paces that our legacy systems weren't designed to scale to or in a cost effective way. So we also saw gaps in the legacy business model to handle these short term needs for services like pandemic unemployment insurance, or snap payments, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs that citizens had never applied for in their lifetime. So basically, SLG needed to take a hard but quick look at these demands, then we had to help them determine the fastest path to meet those needs. And let's keep in mind that some of this move from the legacy approach to a living system approach happened in less than two weeks in the pandemic.
Jane Norris: Which was amazing and still I think many people are beginning to see the magnitude of that shift. So great insights there, Alexis. Legacy systems, are they reaching maturity point? And what do state and local governments need to be thinking about as they begin to upgrade their systems, so they don't once again, get locked into a new legacy system?
Alexis Bonnell: It's such a great question. And I would love to also just kind of share those kudos to some of those public servants that Maria mentioned that, you know, in such short time, such short order really did tackle transformative change. And I think that, you know, for all of us, change is daunting, right? And transformation is often no different. It's super daunting. But because of that, what we tend to suggest is you can start small, you can tackle a big problem, you know, as Maria outlined, but in a small way. And really, the key to that is data agility. It's really about unlocking that data. And there are really easy tools, for example, API's and other approaches that let at letter leaders bridge kind of between the data and systems of today and what they need tomorrow. And one of the things we always try to keep in mind is that, you know, we really want to have empathy. And I know firsthand what it is to be, you know, one of those public servants and understanding that tech teams might be small, but in ways that the challenges are big, right. So for example, how to map all of the assets in a city and make sure they work together. And maintenance is optimized, you know, how to prevent improper payments and catch fraud, how to get critical services and constituents hands? These are all challenges that, you know, have often been navigated, and especially in the last year, not always by wholesale replacing current systems, but rather asking ourselves what data needs to be unlocked what data needs to be actionable? And how can we do that without turning over the apple card. And I think also, because so many tools are now made to be interoperable and multi or hybrid cloud, it's actually easier than ever to start to transition.
Jane Norris: I think that probably makes a lot of people feel easier about the transition that they're either considering or in the midst of. So before we leave this topic, let's talk about living systems. You mentioned living systems. In your previous answer. Maria, can you expound on that a little bit, and tell us whether living systems can achieve significant leaps in performance, agility and innovation?
Maria Zuliani: Sure, Jane. Yeah, I can. So we saw in many of the projects who've worked on this past year, some of the examples that come to mind include DMV services. So they used to all be in person services that had to be rewritten to become remote services during the pandemic, document AI or artificial intelligence used by some of our Google partners, for example, to collect paper documents that had been previously submitted in person, or dropped on a case workers office desk. We also had to do queues that had to scale dynamically yet accommodate social distancing. So virtual waiting rooms became part of the innovation to improve the citizen experience while keeping them all safe glue yourself a performance agility example would be one that I would think of like the New York State Department of Labor, unemployment insurance, their UI, we didn't touch the legacy system to handle the temporary pandemic unemployment insurance. But we did help modernize the front end, help it scale all those new applications, we basically augmented their legacy system to make it that living system with innovations for the new virtual interaction with the citizens. And then the impacts are immediate. The new technology, for example, was enabling the state to process more than 100,000 UI claims in just the first 24 hours. It also gave the citizens a way to access multiple benefit programs, and the option to even apply on a mobile phone, which wasn't an option in the past.
Jane Norris: Well, that's amazing. And that's quite an accomplishment. So congratulations to the New York Department of Labor into the other client examples you gave I love the client examples. They're great. Alexis, maybe you can weigh in on the difference between a living system and a legacy system and how they operate.
Alexis Bonnell: Sure. And you know, this is one of the things that I really have been excited about this idea of just shifting not only the technology, but even our kind of cultural approach to our programs and systems. So the way I would kind of simplify it is that legacy systems were really built for a pre-determined objective, and deliver that to various degrees of success. It's like designing something and, and trapping it under glass, if you will, kind of assuming it won't change significantly. You might have little tweaks here and there, but it's really designed for a certain moment in time and a certain purpose. What's different about a living system is that a living system assumes change. It assumes the program that are going to evolve. It assumes the needs of stakeholders and citizens were evolved. It assumes that more and better data will come about and that that will unlock the opportunity for more and better programs. A living system is about this Mining to expect and foster change and build in flexibility, assuming better technology will be available and being better positioned to use it to use the data to use new partners in a ways you can't predict now. And what that means is that, you know, a critical element of this is also thinking about a living system and a different technologies funding model, for example, it's very hard to have a living system, if you're faced with things like vendor lock in or pricing models where your data usage and consumption, you know, might skyrocket as you evolve. And so one of the things I've been really impressed by is seeing fatty IT leaders, you know, really refusing lochans, asking for agile platforms and data plans, but also guard really in the data cost structure so that they know exactly what they're going to pay that year. Even if their system is evolving beyond our expectations. We see a lot of appetite for inletting systems for kind of more plug and play technology, especially technology that they're non-technical folks can start to leverage, you know, so for example, at Google, a lot of use of things like app sheet have helped many program people actually use their own dashboards on top of legacy systems or Apogee applies API overlays so that it leaders can kind of maintain the status quo, if you will, but change the front end user interface, etc. You know, to fangirl out for a moment, I loved what the defense innovation unit did as part of their really being intentional about designing a living system. And that is, from the very beginning, they said, You know what, we are going to use multiple providers, we're going to use Google, we're going to use Microsoft, greenies AWS, you know, clouds from day one. And they then leverage things like anthos, and dq as their data brain center. But that really allowed them to use whatever technology whatever provider was best to keep that single point of command on their data, while getting the benefits of all of the inner partners. And last thing I'd say about that is that, you know, I sit here I work at Google, part of the reason I came over was because I was so excited about how technology was changing. And I think the beauty of a living system is that there are going to be technologies that don't exist now that do in six months, right, that are going to help that citizen experience. They're going to exist entirely different structures two years from now. And so that idea of saying, you know what we know what's going to happen, we've seen it unfold over the last year, let's design for that assumption, instead of solving only for the problem and the moment of time we find ourselves.
Jane Norris: Right, because change is constant. And there will always be only inevitable. Something that will take its place, and you want to be able to be prepared for that and have a system that is able to accommodate that in the future. This is great information. And I really appreciate the examples. So let's go now and talk a little bit about what you need to do to prepare for that step of innovation. And that is, you know, organizing your data to support a living system, and what impact it has on other organizational goals like sustainability, which is a big topic of conversation right now. So Maria, can we start with you? Can you discuss a data modernization strategy that can help organizations achieve data agility, so they have the right information at the right time to make decisions about their businesses and what direction they're going to go?
Maria Zuliani: Right. Having the ability to make the good business decision means you have to have the data. So often, Jane, we hear from customers how they have their data warehouse, but it's too big, it doesn't scale or it has too much bad data. So the results aren't valuable. When we ask them why we hear all about the data they're collecting. And we hear the wrong list wish list what they like to be able to collect to make a better decision. They either don't have the performance capacity, the storage, or the access to all the uncollected data to make that effective change, and better business decisions. So a traditional data warehouse isn't always the best choice for processing those large workloads, or the applications like analytics. And I don't want to make this into a sales pitch. But an example for Google, we have BigQuery. So that's our petabyte scale data warehouse. With that, we guarantee that there's no matter how much data you throw at it, it's going to remain blazing fast. His secret is its serverless architecture, where we separate the storage technology from the query processing technology, that this enables us to scale it down to zero when you're not using it, or turbo it up to petabyte scale when you do need it. Now that means BigQuery can eliminate the need for managing your data warehouse infrastructure. So you can focus on the data analyzing, that's where the business decisions are, they're not managing the infrastructure itself. It's about the data. So these kind of strategies that help reduce risk and shift their investment from cap x off x often mean there's no huge upfront infrastructure and a data warehouse license procurement. Let's face it during the pandemic, we didn't have the time to go make those large acquisitions and get them on the floor. It enables the citizens or the agencies to provide more self-service analytics and advanced analytics. This innovative approach to technology can be game changing for government agencies and the citizens they serve at a moment's need. Now, one of the fun stories that I like to talk about or that I enjoyed hearing as a modernization strategy along this line, was Utah's Department of Wildlife Resources, and their wildlife tracking data warehouse. And keep in mind, they can barely run any queries in the legacy data warehouse. But now all that data and more is in Google's BigQuery. So they can do some really cool visualizations, like seeing the migration path of 1000s of animals all at the same time. To me, that gives a totally new meaning to migration.
Jane Norris: And then they can use that information. I'm not sure how they use it, but to even, you know, count the number of animals or where they're feeding or other kinds of issues that are very important. And so to give more information without having to do the field work is just amazing. It's an amazing capability. Yeah, let's then stick on this topic for a minute. But move to the part of the improvement in services that deals with sustainability. I know this is something Alexis that you have delved a lot into. So how do legacy system modernizations impact sustainability goals for state and local governments? Does it position organizations to meet increased demand and improve their carbon footprint as well?
Alexis Bonnell: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that is really interesting about technology is that so many people often assume that they since they can't see their email, right, flying through the air, they can't see a digital bike, if you will, that data and technology aren't a sustainability issue. But actually, you know, they're huge contributors to organizations, larger carbon footprint, and one of the things that I always like to ask people to reflect on is, every dollar you spent, is really a sustainability decision. And, you know, as emphasis on sustainability, and environment kind of grow for leaders, you know, they really, very rarely think to look to their IT teams for quick sustainability wins, but they're really missing out on a huge opportunity. First of all, one of the things that I would love anyone listening now to know is that we would be absolutely thrilled to help any it leader out there right now estimate their current carbon footprint for their current system, so that they can understand what their current system might be contributing to the carbon footprint of the organization of the mission. And we just think that's an important number that any it or mission leader should know, it's just the responsible thing to do now. But even more exciting than that, you know, part of what one of the reasons I'm so proud to be, you know, at Google is that our entire tech stack is already carbon neutral now. And so what that meant was that, you know, recently on Earth Day, you know, for the IT leaders who do work with Google, they actually got to celebrate, you know, on April 22nd, by sharing how their organization's entire tech stacks were already carbon neutral, not in five years from now, and are just not a target 10 years from now. But you know, for many of these agencies, this has been an incredible advantage as they bring and think about and last year, think about how much of their program their services have their missions were brought into a digital world and to be able to do that, at the same time of making carbon neutrality gains. I mean, talk about a two for one, right? Just, you know, that is the type of migration that just gives you so many extra benefits.
Jane Norris: Wow, that's amazing. And yes, there are, you know, not just the goals of getting new functionality and interoperability. The goal is to do that while you're also working sustainably. And that is definitely I think, a goal for the federal government. I know, and I'm sure state governments are involved as well. Maria, can you share some information about that? How are they moving towards sustainability goals and state and local governments?
Maria Zuliani: So Alexis makes a great point. And each time we work with customers on our data center modernization efforts, we're constantly reminded of the added benefits, including that they're not only moving their whole data center, but they're going to lower their carbon footprint by doing so. And a great example I have for you Jane is city of Pittsburgh. So with Pittsburgh, their goal was to move to cloud in three to five years. But with Google's help city, IT leaders in the mayor field now it's possible to achieve that move in only two, three years. And the move is already underway with the help of one of our premier Google partners cloud bakers, who took a phased approach and Develop the hybrid cloud architecture by connecting their legacy VMware system to Google Cloud Platform. And Alexis and I, we've both seen these modernization projects fail over the years. But taking baby steps, not a big bang approach to replacing the whole legacy system at once, has proven in many cases to be more successful and faster. And that's the approach that Pittsburgh cloud bakers have taken. Well, the result of this data center modernization Not only is helping with sustainability by repurposing the data center, but they're giving back that valuable real estate and the physical space for other city services in this 100 year old building in downtown Pittsburgh is improving sustainability, as I said, and by moving their carbon footprint, it also includes removing the diesel generators they have, but generally just a move to the cloud helps the city or is going to be helping the city meet the citizen benefits faster, it's going to provide expansion of in technology way of their VMs. And it's going to give them the ability to spin up virtual machines and Miss versus months because they quite honestly, it hit capacity and didn't want to invest in a new capex model is acquiring and bringing more hardware on-premise. It also in fun way helps them build out their smart cities approach for parking situations, for example, on the streets, in parking decks, how citations are being handed out how it integrates in with traffic data and ways for example. And then this was actually kind of fun in real life, sitting through the discussions with the city, how today's pandemic and the new curbside pickup situation for restaurants that weren't open for dine in, how the pickup services, were creating parking and traffic situations that the city needed to be more on top of, and their old analytics hadn't taken that into consideration. So these kinds of modernizations help not only the old problems, but the future problems that are to come.
Jane Norris: That's amazing. Because the more information you have, the more information you use. And if you have it in a form, that it's actually usable. And you can see patterns, decisions can flow from those and that I think is important for every organization, federal, state, and local governments all need that kind of functionality. So thank you very much for that. Appreciate the insights. And the topic of sustainability will continue to be top of mind for governments at every level, I'd love to hear more about it. But let's move on to something that is an underpinning of this. And that is managing new cloud environments and the costs of doing so. I know many organizations are either in the cloud now or moving there. So Maria, can you give us some information about the transition to an open source cloud environment, and managing the cost of that move in the short term?
Maria Zuliani: Sure, Jane. So what we're seeing organizations that are transitioning to the cloud, there have an emphasis on trying to manage the costs for the long and the short term projects. Now Google Cloud not only offers many open source options, but we also have industry best practice process, the governance and reliability. But the unique models that we've been offering our customers is a fixed price, Google Cloud subscription agreement for public sector. And this helps the customers on their modernization journey for those short and long term projects. The customers are concerned about fixed prices for fixed quantities of solution, discounts based on usage, and then the fact that every product has a different price in multiple skews. But we've seen tremendous success in helping to manage the costs with a single skew the discounts upfront and fixed price, the whole solution and a defined use case, this approach is helping them put the budget fears at ease yet provides some flexibility on how the solution is migrated and then modernized too.
Jane Norris: Right that sounds like a good option for many CIOs are looking at this. Alexis, can you talk about a cloud strategies for data management and the best ways to enable agile services, advanced technologies? And other I guess, capabilities that would flow from Cloud?
Alexis Bonnell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what this really presents us with again, is this opportunity to think beyond kind of in air quotes, today's needs and systems right, and to create a vision of a new approach that keeps up with how your work and the world is evolving. I remember really vividly when you know, as a public servant, there were so many times I just wanted to try something, but it took so much to navigate getting started and really With that inertia, that kind of having to get started is what kills so many great ideas and governments and one of my favorite, you know, new tools that we're seeing pop up is this concept of rad labs. And in essence, what they are is the ability for a customer to create a living an agile environment, a cloud environment for their data, you know, for their partners, for their vendors, and others to actually work collaboratively and securely in it, while knowing to Maria's point exactly what it's going to cost them, you know, up here, each of your friends without any type of lock in. But I think what's so critical about this is what it unlocks, it really unlocks this idea of being able to much more rapidly test and pilot things without having to create a technology architecture, or a new contract, or any of those types of things from scratch each time. And I will say that, you know, so much of what we're trying to tackle is new, right, and being able to do that type of experimentation, that type of iteration is so key to be able to move quickly. And I would say the last thing on that, that I would love to emphasize is that I want to see our IT leaders, you know, be demanding, you know, you know, make the cloud really, you know, work for you cloud and data, agile models, things like Kubernetes, you know, and container approaches to data, really give far more flexibility and ability to use the data by the right person at the right time for the right insight. And so I would say, you know, this is the time for IT leaders to be really bold, be really demanding about creating kind of how they want to work, you know, now and in the future.
Jane Norris: That's great advice. And I love hearing these examples. Maria, you have quite a few you've been working with clients on some of their strategies and moving to the cloud. So can you give us some insight on how states are handling their cloud strategies?
Maria Zuliani: Yeah, so, Alexis was spot on with how many of the states are managing to breathe life, again, into the legacy systems, including one that I worked on, or that many of us have worked on at Google, is the vaccine systems, which were, as I believe it was Michael Leahy, the Secretary of it for Maryland had pointed out in your series on Monday, that many of those legacy vaccine systems were just simply meant to track the flu. So we help many of those states like New York, again, Arizona, Massachusetts, and many others, but we help them scale out their system using Google Kubernetes. When the demand spikes, for example, for the vaccine eligibility kept hitting different age ranges, or phases kept opening up. And each of the states saw that demand spike up, they needed that flexibility to be able to scale instantly. And I can tell you, for an example of one of the legacy vaccine registration or management systems that we built for the scale, or the capacity that we all experienced that I worked on firsthand, one of the states needed to augment their legacy system. And we did so by creating a version two in Google Cloud. And this way, version one was still up, but it stayed up longer didn't crash, and it could handle more citizen connections, along with all the call center agents that were all making appointments, at the same time that citizens were making appointments using the version two that was in Google Cloud for the same exact vaccine timeslot. So this way, we were able to dynamically balance the load of the incoming connections for their using waiting room technologies, which was another innovation, we added on to the flexibility, we were able to scale the new application and the database tier without any performance issues. And we're able to still send all the updates of these appointments, tracking records, back to their legacy system of record, all for the source code. So it was a way to be flexible, and yet handle both legacy and cloud in a hybrid model for that flexibility.
Jane Norris: That's really great. I mean, can you tell us what timeframe that happened in, you know, building the new system while the legacy was still operating? Was that like, weeks or months? Or what was that? What did that look like?
Maria Zuliani: That was literally over a few weeks to two months, and it's still a live system. And we literally update it weekly, with the customer for different changes as the users and the business needs keep coming up with new changes.
Jane Norris: Wow that is really something. Thank you very much for sharing that. I love these examples, as I say, and let's delve into this a little bit further and talk a little bit about sharing data across the enterprise to improve collaboration and interoperability. Maria, what is happening there, and how are these new systems living systems, cloud enablement? How do those capabilities interact with that?
Maria Zuliani: So for that one, Jane, I'd say sharing is key. He'd motorization your effectiveness and how work from home, quite frankly, has been successful. So the world, not only government customers during the pandemic, it's simply emphasized to me and accelerated everyone's need for the ability to collaborate more effectively. And everyone had to be ready basically, yesterday, right, Jane, Alexis and I have all been working in government space for a long time. But this is the first time I've seen projects start to finish in weeks or months, versus years, you know, as we just talked about, for that vaccine example. But the best example, that I think is the need for better collaboration, we would think probably about the state of West Virginia. Now, they recently signed a multiyear agreement with Google Cloud, that's going to not only save the millions, but it's going to help basically digitally transform and improve their operational effectiveness. It's basically helping their momentum for innovation, security and resiliency, with adding the ability for better collaboration. It's all a part of modernization.
Jane Norris: And part of modernization. And I think the part of any transition is to make sure that whatever it is that you're putting in place is secure. That is a major concern when they when nascio, the state organization of CIOs does their surveys about their concerns and priorities. A cybersecurity is always number one. So if we could talk about that for a moment, Alexis, what are the cybersecurity implications at state and local levels about new living systems? How is the cybersecurity issue handled? And is that an add on or is that a feature that's already included in the system?
Alexis Bonnell: Well, you know, Jane, I would love to see us really shift our thinking beyond kind of there's a patch for that, right? You really think about living systems, we actually think about designing them in a way that expects that the rest of the world is living to right, we're going to continue to get threats to get attacks, etc. And so I think one of the things we have to think about, and for us, you know, that's really our mindset, our mentality is what we call Zero Trust. And we really think Zero Trust is kind of the thing that allows you to have that live living system, because the reality is, if you trust nothing, then no matter what changes, you don't trust it, you're starting with a pretty good, you know, good base. And so we really look at that to be about compliance without compromise. And I think one of the things that's been hard is that, you know, public sector customers often are forced to kind of adopt cloud in a way that actually slows their access to innovation, and often critically emerges, you know, what security and compliance issues are, there's always some type of extra tool they have to add in order to be secure. And I think one of the big game changers is the idea that you can have all the wonders of cloud, you know, the data, navigate navigation of big data, the productivity tools, and the benefit of data security with Zero Trust Belton. And I think, you know, to that point, zero, trusting your security protocols, they shouldn't feel like bolt ons, right, they should be blended into the very living fibers of that living system. And, you know, one of the things that I want to share is that, you know, our Zero Trust approach came from being hacked ourselves many years ago. And we said to ourselves, you know, what, a patch isn't good enough, we have to fundamentally change how we work. And so to that point, Zero Trust is built into all of our systems and comes with our technology automatically. So you can have that flexibility, you can have that scale of cloud while upgrading to Zero Trust and a 100% carbon neutral system in one go. And I think, you know, one of the groups that was really forward leaning on this was New York City Cyber Command. So NYC three, you know, their centralized organization, they lead New York cyber defense efforts, they work across the city, nonprofit city government to prevent, detect, respond and recover from cyber threats. And if you think about it, you know, New York City is the most populous city in the country. It's the world's, you know, one of the world's cultural financial media capitals. It's a unique place with a huge influx of visitors, you know, a melting pot of diversity, home of headquarters, the UN, I mean, you can imagine that all of those things are amazing, but they also make it a prime target for threat actors, you know, which is why they've had to be fundamentally proactive in addressing that risk. You know, I think one of the things that, you know, they decided to do early on was to use a cloud first strategy, use infrastructures code, you know, some of our beyond core security models that really build upon of yours or Google more than a decade worth of Zero Trust networking. And I think ultimately, what that meant is that they were able to modernize, you know, from that legacy system into a living system, they were able to live and adapt to each of those threats in a truly, you know, fundamentally different way. It also was really important that These are not necessarily just because they're incredible entities, we really still had to empower a small team of their leadership and their team to be able to do this right, it doesn't necessarily have to take dozens and dozens of people to maintain security. And I think the most important thing is Maria has mentioned before, is, you know, you're talking about a need to be able to sustain that scalability, you know, analyzing petabytes of data, traffic, etc., while keeping kind of that Zero Trust, trust, nothing approach. So it sounds maybe sounds a little bit problematic. But as we become we're living as we become more dynamic. We trust fewer people. And that actually is one of the reasons why, you know, we have not had the type of impact of hacks and other things that that others have had just because of that fundamental mind shift and cultural change in our approach to security.
Jane Norris: It is a managed security system, right? I mean, so there is ongoing, there are ongoing capabilities that you bring to clients because they're using these services.
Alexis Bonnell: Exactly. I mean, if you think about a living system, and you think about it being built into the fiber, it's like every, I don't want to say every second it changes. But yeah, every second, it's adapting, morphing, changing to you know, really have that that Zero Trust be built in. So the Zero Trust service that you're getting, you know, at this moment is going to be even more advanced than what we were getting just five seconds ago in our conversation.
Jane Norris: Five seconds ago, just sometimes a lifetime. That's great information that Alexis, can you Maria, can you talk to us about how state and local governments are finding? Are they finding success with Zero Trust in their cybersecurity approach?
Maria Zuliani: Yeah, Jane is matter of fact, I'm going to refer back to a comment from Monday. Again, I think this my last time, I'll do that. Fred Brittain, from the CIO from Maine, he pointed out which I thought was really great when he did this a very important fact. So all the legacy systems, for the most part have been designed to augment face to face interaction with the citizens and users. But that interaction basically got flipped to augmenting virtual engagements and collaboration now. And I can't emphasize enough how the states have augmented security to the existing legacy and the new COVID related systems that they had to create. As part of that flip. We went and augmented many of those legacy systems by adding reCAPTCHA, for example, not only to protect the websites, but for fraud prevention, to stop the bad actors who were starting to steal credentials for unemployment insurance, starting to steal credit cards more often to make when people were making purchases, and even to stop bot attacks from stealing vaccine appointments. That one was the why I personally was involved with and it just, I hate to say it appalled me. But that's what we're fighting against these days, at like you said, every five seconds, something changes.
Jane Norris: Something changes, and you need to be prepared for it in advance of it happening. That's the most difficult part, I think for CIOs, that they always need to be prepared and things are constantly evolving. So we've covered a lot of territory today, you know, interoperability, collaboration, sustainability, now cybersecurity, and we're getting toward the end of this fascinating hour. So I would love to ask and I would be remiss if I did not do so some of your experiences and best practices and working with clients on their legacy it modernization efforts, can you give us some insights into how states are handling these transitions, what they're asking you some of the questions that maybe they share in common?
Alexis Bonnell: Sure, I'll pick that one. I think one of the things that I was going to emphasize, you know, two different practices, I think one is on one hand, when you think about the best practice, this idea of thinking big. And what I mean by that is, you know, there was a state out west, who was looking to create a blueprint for social services really s 360 degree view for social service caseworkers, who wanted to track individuals, but not just in kind of one silo, they wanted to be able to look at Department of Corrections, not just human services or Child Services. And I think what's really key about that is recognizing that, you know, the more you can embrace kind of your constituent is more, the more you can bring in that data and understand what they're really navigating the more you can provide really incredible programs that really hit the needs. And I think what was so exciting about that, one is that they managed to do that type of modernization, right? really moving away from silos to kind of that broader view, that broader service, you know, in less than two years, and you know, far more effectively than the normal eight, you know, to nine figure price tag or 10 Year Award. And so, I think you know, what's really interesting about that example is you can think big, especially when you're embracing your citizen or constituents, but at the same time, you know, find agility, easy to use. You know, and, and cost effective acquisition that can get you there quickly. And then on the flip side, maybe the compliment of that is really starting small. So my grandma used to tell the old adage of, you know, you don't know what part of an elephant, you know you're eating, you just have to start with a little part of it. And so you know, and we have a state in the northeast that really had huge pressures to scale. But they didn't have five years, you know, to rewrite their application. And so what we did is we just said, let's just start with the front end, right? Let's start with that part that in essence, people experience because you can make the backend information and legacy work. But really, that's that baby step, that little bite of the elephant, if you will. Like while thinking big having that Northstar vision is really kind of what we see is the magic combination to help public servants kind of move in the right direction for living. But the way I would phrase it is kind of have the art of the possible in mind, but start with the art of the practical.
Jane Norris: Sounds like there are a lot of options for states to consider when they start to look at the technology that's available out there. And they can use the options that are workable for them for their individual these, some will have a Citizen Services, desire to improve Citizen Services, others will have specific needs, like the ones you were talking about, for health and human services. So I guess it's a pick and choose menu. And then you add on as you go. Does that sound right? Alexis?
Alexis Bonnell: You got it.
Jane Norris: Yep. So Maria, let's talk about from a technology standpoint, the things that need to be in place, so that state and local organizations can start their modernization journeys, what do they need to be thinking about their?
Maria Zuliani: Well, Jane, we've seen them asking us for thinking about what's their entry point to cloud there? How do you start helping with that modernization journey. And often we start with simply an assessment, or they even completed an assessment with another vendor, but they saw too much risk or too much change being proposed being proposed. And that's an area of concern when it tends to be a legacy system, especially a database. So I've been able to leverage my years of database design experience to help guide a lot of the agencies on their options, so they can choose their path, the cloud, is it going to be lift and shift? Is it going to be application change, or a hybrid combination of all those, and even hybrid of on prem in the cloud, many of them have been pleasantly surprised by how many platforms even Google has to offer for their transitional transactional databases, especially things like Oracle. So these are risk adverse customers with lifetime careers are skills that often feel threatened by cloud vendors. But Google isn't taking an approach to throw those skills away. So I've been architecting solutions that allow them to lift and shift quickly to Google Cloud, that helps them reduce the cost of maintaining the legacy infrastructure in the cloud at the same time chain that's basically the enabler that speeds their journey to modernizing the application end of the legacy system. Or we've had them ask for Google Cloud platforms, they're similar or like what they have on prem, like, for example, VMware environments. So we have that it type of environment in the cloud, which they can leverage in Google Cloud, as per example, us would start is their DR region.
Jane Norris: And you know, the cost of doing this, Maria, that's got to be a concern for many of the CIOs out there. They live in very defined budgets, how do they handle that? Generally?
Maria Zuliani: Well, the cost is basically what we referred to a little bit earlier, we've been trying to help them with the cost, and find ways for them to handle both the on prem budgeting that they have today. And that migration into the cloud. And one of the ways that we help them do that is accelerate the migration. So that they're, they don't have that huge upfront cost of sustaining both environments at the same time. That's key for the CIOs in those budgets.
Jane Norris: All right, great. Thank you very much, Alexis, we're going to finally look at a very important topic, and that is the workforce and how the workforce of the future is enabled, how they'll be able to work within these hybrid approaches, new environments, new technologies, new capabilities, what should states and local governments be thinking about when training their workforce to handle these new capabilities, or to make sure that their culture can work within the new capability that's coming online?
Alexis Bonnell: So glad you asked that. It's funny, I actually have a 21 year old son and I can definitely tell you that his expectations of the technology of the culture he's going to see in business, you know, and all those types of things are so fundamentally different, you know, than his father and mine and so I think that there's a few things really that no government has to be intentional about navigating I think one is, is this idea of interoperability, right? I mean, we joke that, you know, in kindergarten, you learn that you're supposed to play nicely together, right? And we should really look at technology the same way, how is it interoperable? How are we making it easy for people to use the tool, either they know the best, or that is a right tool without having an adding a lot of headache, right, and transitioning between tools and information. I think that idea we saw really powerfully over the last year, this idea that people, you know, email and communications tools, they're about connectivity, they're about intimacy, right there about being able to collaborate being able to design together, and we don't always have what feels like a luxury now, right, and being in the same room and being able to do that together. And so it's really critical to think about what are those ways of thinking about our systems, not only as a way that I did information from one place to another, but the humaneness that felt experience, you know, the intimacy of it, this also has to do with things like equity and multi tool. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is this idea, you know, that much of a new talent, that governments looking to attract, you know, for example, may not be native or may not know, the systems that government is currently using, you know, so for example, they may be Google natives, because they use Gmail in their personal lives. And they know that. And so I think, really savvy tech leaders are scoring not only things like multi cloud, or hybrid cloud, but also multi tool. And that's not only about just being able to attract talent, and make sure that you know, the new talent, they want to kind of see themselves, if you will, in the technology culture of the organization. But it's also about moving away a little bit from kind of saturation and dependency on any one provider, right? Or a monoculture, if you will, around tech, and really, instead kind of teaching that technology or expecting that technology to play nicely together. So that staff can really use whatever tool bring out what I'd like to call their A game, right. And for different staff, that's different things. And, you know, this is one of the reasons why we really work to make workspace completely interoperable with offices, we really wanted people to be able to be as productive as possible with others, regardless of the tools that the group was using. I think the other thing that's really interesting, too, that we're seeing a huge trend on as maybe a last insight is that, you know, workforce productivity tools have always been viewed traditionally as separate from mission tools. And if we think about this, in terms of, you know, systems, the workforce misused to issue, let's say, a permit, or conduct an inspection, you know, versus the tools they might need to collaborate and communicate internally. A lot of this is due to the fact that, you know, internal tooling for productivity and collaboration didn't meet the requirements for business process, but we can really disrupt that now using low code, no code platforms that really offer basic collaboration capabilities, and an expectation of collaboration new out of the box. And what's important is that when we think about the future of work is that we think about collaboration in context, the role that you're in the public service you fulfill, and all of those should be brought into the workspace kind of eliminating logging on multitude of systems to process work, versus sending an email etc. So I think this is what's really exciting. This is where digital transformation is born from that idea of creating the productivity internally, instantly translates how you serve your customers. So I'm really excited about how we're going to take kind of this future of work and actually blend it more seamlessly so that we can get more done more effectively. And that you know, are the technologies really enable that instead of being barriers to that.
Jane Norris: That is great insight and more collaboration so that people can work together to solve problems and bring new solutions and iterate on one another. I think that is also a great asset that these new tools can bring to the party. So I want to thank you both today, I have learned so much and we've covered so much information, you've done it so eloquently. So personally, I just like to thank you for talking with me today about how state and local governments are handling legacy systems modernization, and moving to living systems. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: If you'd like more information on how Google or Carahsoft can assist your state, municipality or county upgrade their legacy it and data management systems, please visit www.carahsoft.com/Google or email us at Google@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.