As state and local agencies continue to modernize their IT systems, many are still just starting their journeys to the cloud in earnest, assessing where to start, what's needed, and what to expect. I'm Wyatt Cash with Scoop News Group, and you're going to talk about that today, and the value of working with experienced partners are Nick Perez, Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at Thundercat Technology, and Brian Sheffley, Manager, Partner Solution Architects at Amazon Web Services. Nick and Brian, thank you so much, and welcome to the program. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Brian, I'm going to start with you. Set the stage for us here just a bit. What are some of the ways that you're seeing state and local governments operating or delivering public services more effectively using today's cloud services?
So our state and local government customers at AWS Worldwide Public Sector are using AWS in a variety of different ways to reduce their total cost of ownership and improve their resilience in the cloud. And so we're seeing state and local government agencies do everything from revolutionize the way they're delivering transportation services, secure and improve the voter registration process. Just a wide variety of ways that organizations are either fighting fraud payments or improving the delivery of the services that they're using to uplift the communities and the constituents that they serve. And then for agencies that are still deciding how best to capitalize on the cloud, where are you using the best opportunities for early returns on investment?
And why does it make sense to work with an experienced partner in the larger ecosystem of cloud developers and providers? Yeah. So AWS were found of saying that speed disproportionately matters in business and the same is true for public sector. So the best opportunities for early returns on investment are to get started with workloads that are easily migrated to the cloud, whether that's backup and disaster recovery, consolidation of remote and branch office file storage services in the cloud.
Just these lightweight workloads that have immediate return on investment by moving them to the cloud can really help organizations build a strong foundation for adapting more cloud services in the future and modernizing the way they deliver information services going forward. And there's really no compression algorithm for experience either. So it absolutely makes sense for a customer to work with an experienced partner who has seen projects be very successful, has seen where projects typically fall down and provide just critical, critical guidance that customers need to get started quickly, avoid the mistakes that others have made and start getting that return on investment immediately. So Nick, let me bring you in here.
What are the primary benefits that state and local agencies are likely to realize by starting a cloud migration using a specialty cloud service firm like yours? Absolutely. So the two key benefits that we help agencies with are agility and cost predictability. AWS is the market leader in the cloud market and agencies are accelerating their ability to deliver business outcomes because of how many out of the box API services that Amazon is enabling is providing them and giving them access to.
And secondarily, it's really unlimited capacity. As a traditional architect, we spend a lot of time capacity planning, designing systems for peak usage. And when you use a cloud provider such as AWS, you have basically unlimited amount of scale. You have unlimited amount of storage, networking compute.
And so when you are designing a system for peak, those are very, very challenging things to do when you're buying on-premise hardware. You typically have a cap on the amount of finances and you have a cap on the amount of footprint you have in the data center. You don't have that when accessing a cloud provider. And then thirdly, really IT consumption models have evolved, right?
And they are now powerful alternatives to that traditional upfront purchase. You can rent equipment. You can subscribe to equipment. And then the traditional model is you pay as you go.
This whole movement of capital expense to an operational expense and helping agencies do that on a daily basis, they really become fast, agile, and really can speak to market of delivering outcomes. And then Nick, can you offer maybe a couple of examples of where a public sector agency has indeed achieved faster and more effective outcomes and greater agility working with specialty cloud service firm? Absolutely. Yes.
So I'll see the most recent one with everybody moving out of their workplace is the virtual desktop infrastructure. Being able to create those desktops in the cloud, be able to secure them and patch them centrally and having storage. That's been the number one use case that everyone's been after as this virtual workforce and be able to keep people working. Disaster Recovery, that was really with the very first use case that we helped customers with and it still is, or a major player, of having that assurance that you have conformity between two systems so that you have typical disaster recovery, you have a secondary data center location, you try to have parity of 100% compliance between what you have in production and what you have.
It's very difficult because you've got equipment just sitting there, kind of dormant, waiting for something to happen. And the cloud enables you to be able to do that and have that parity and continuity, but have systems that are just waiting for an event where they're actually switched off. And then thirdly, development and tests. That would be a key use case of where you have software developers that want access to environments and scale and ultimately be able to shut those off.
That's how we help customers save a lot of their operational expense of leveraging the cloud because they're able to turn off those environments. You turn them off at 6pm at night and then they come on automated at 8am in the morning. So you get that kind of, and agency doesn't think of that. When they're on premise with virtual machines, they don't think about turning stuff off, but that's the power of the cloud is you only consume that cloud asset when you need it.
So when a developer is writing code or when you're actually testing a system, you're consuming it. Just like you do when you plug something in the wall at home or in the office, that's when you're consuming the power and that's when you stop paying for it. Amazon provides that very, very same flexible, convenient feature where when you plug it in, you consume it and you're being metered and then when you unplug it or you turn it off, those costs off. Well, finally, gentlemen, what parting recommendation would you suggest public sector leaders consider as they think about their IT and cloud investment strategies?
Brian, maybe we'll start with you. So I think there are really three key takeaways that listeners should have when we talk about getting started with a cloud investment strategy. And number one is you really want to start with a test case. Innovation doesn't always have to take a big bang approach and sometimes it's best for transformation to happen gradually.
And that's exactly what the Commonwealth of Virginia learned during the pandemic. Virginia launched an opioid pilot project and new workforce employer portal and they used those initiatives as test beds for innovation and to build a solid data governance framework across all the state government. The pilots brought together diverse data sets from the state's different departments and partners, which ultimately positioned Virginia really well for the data integration strategies at level of collaboration it needed when it went out to implement as part of its COVID-19 response. Second lesson would be begin with the end user in mind.
And anytime you're deploying a new tool or a new service, governments are really often more results focused than customer focused. And a lot of this has to do with stringent reporting requirements, compliance and funding requirements that they need to follow, but institutional inertia has also played a significant role. And what we've really seen that's encouraging is the state of Rhode Island and how they reimagined how they delivered services. And they decided to retool their existing unemployment insurance system to handle the pandemic related surge in unemployment claims.
And they used our Amazon's working backwards process to ensure what the state was building would effectively serve their end users. And ultimately this product development process involved organization envisioning what it's completed product would look like and the capabilities and features that it would have. And lastly, it's really important to work with an experienced cloud provider to bolster agility and security. The state of New York Power Authority work with partners, work with AWS to deliver an AI and ML powered solution that protects New York state utilities from hacking and other threats that exist out there in the world.
And so those three things, which is work with a partner, begin with your end user in mind and start with a test case. As I say, the best time to start was yesterday, but the second best time is right now. Well, those are some great recommendations and examples as well. Nick, do you have any parting recommendations for state and local leaders?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like Brian mentioned, get started, right? There's quite a lot to learn. Pick a workload that is easy to digest.
It's not to be mission critical, but something that's important, something that you can get with the right stakeholders behind, right? But get started. Don't forget to get the information security team involved right at the start. You're going to want access to data.
They're going to want to place that data in the cloud or active directory or, you know, anything, you know, access to stuff that's on premise, right? You're going to be extending your security perimeter to the cloud provider. The cloud providers have been offering these solutions now for, I mean, Amazon for 15 years, right? They're very mature.
They have lots of best practices for how to operate and obviously how to secure these workloads. But there's only three real key concepts. The agencies may not have, you know, real familiarity today is, you know, your management of a not to exceed contract and a not in labor service. That's the kind of key aspect here is it's a contract that's typically set monthly in a rear's billing and you set a not to exceed amount that you're going to use.
And that's going to figure out how to estimate what that amount might be. These are non-labor services. You know, Amazon has 200 plus services that you can activate in your technical team. So being able to track that accurately, right?
You are managing vendor. Now you're managing a vendor and you're managing service level agreements. So that may not be something that someone's very familiar with. So we'd be happy to help any agency with their cloud vision, cloud strategy.
We look at it as application or workload candidacy to see if it's a fit for the cloud and ultimately just discuss how which vehicles are available for them to access for these non-labor services and how to work with the contracting officers to figure out how they can get the technical teams to estimate accurately and then be able to manage it against those funds because it's a muted service. And you can pretty much figure any of those two other services as you need them and you leave them running. They can become quite costly. So we'd be happy to help.
Well, Nick Perez at Thundercat Technology and Brian Sheffley at Amazon Web Services. Thank you both very much for sharing some of your insights and some of your recommendations for helping state and local agencies get to the cloud faster. This has been really fun. Thank you.
Thank you very much. And look for more of our coverage on IT modernization at statesgroup.com. This is Wyatt Cash. Thanks for joining us.