New York: how does the IT transform the advanced state?

2013

On October 3, 2013 the Microsoft company reported: the administration of the State of New York selected Office 365 for creation of a single mail system.

Until recently state bodies of the State of New York used about 30 different mail systems, softwares of data processing and texts therefore transition to a single platform will allow to save to the organizations on licenses of the software, the equipment, maintenance, staff costs and power supply more than $3 million annually.

Transition to Office 365 will provide more than 120 thousand employees of state bodies of the state with access to modern Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook) and a possibility of placement of work calendars in a cloud service.

Office 365 will provide administrations of the State of New York:

• A single mail system, the platform for creation of documents, calendars and storage of contacts, tools for joint work of employees and also opportunities for effective file sharing between different state bodies of the state.
• The increased volume of mailboxes – up to 25 Gigabytes. At the moment the volume of mailboxes of employees is 500 Megabytes.
• Secure access to files and e-mails in any place and at any time from any devices, including notebooks, smartphones and tablets. It will help the officials working far off to continue to render services to residents irrespective of location of workers of the sphere of municipal economy.
• Microsoft Office applications, updated and available from different devices: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Publisher.

Project finish of implementation of Office 365 is planned for the end of 2013.

In August, 2013 it became known that the government of the third largest American state New York started cardinal reorganization of all own IT infrastructure which covers and automates activity of 120 thousand employees in more than three tens agencies.

Historically IT infrastructure of the state developed extensively: about 50 data centers were constructed while the agencies developed information technologies on absolutely different in comparison with each other level. While some of them already used a video conferencing, others continued to save backup copies on a tape. The system of e-mail never was uniform and was based on different platforms, such as GroupWise, Notes, Exchange and others.

Until the end of 2012 interaction with IT systems the state for employees of a state machinery was not unified, therefore, also interaction suffered. Besides, the state had no uniform IT of the budget.

At the beginning of 2013 governor of the state Andrew M. Cuomo (Andrew M. Cuomo) created the new agency – Office on IT services (Office of Information Technology Services, OITS). 3300 IT specialists were brought from 37 agencies of the state, all of them passed to work into new structure.Brian Digman was appointed the chief information officer of the state.

Soon after structural reform plans the state on consolidation of 50 separate DPCs within two data centers were announced, this work should be completed by the beginning of 2015 after construction of one of them is fully completed.

In August, 2013 the leadership of the State of New York announced that it translates all employees (we will remind, about 120 thousand people) on use of a cloud solution of Microsoft Office 365 already by the end of 2013. By migration on the new platform staff is going to save up to $3 million annually, however, implementing solution is connected not only with operating costs, but also with productivity and a possibility of all departments to interact in a single system which will be reached.

Problems with the old system of e-mail have explicitly an effect during Hurricane Sandy when many of the agencies of the state lost access to a system because of blackouts.

Approach which offers OITS is not new: in USA the majority of states and also the federal government, at the moment implement programs of consolidation of data centers. Besides, the general course of further informatization of a public sector of the USA is taken on implementation of the cloud solutions first of all offered by the companies Google and Microsoft.

In addition to e-mail, OITS is going to centralize management of networks and applications. According to Digman, the internal IT architecture will be constructed by the principle of a private cloud, and the provider for providing public cloud services is not defined yet.