Panel reviews state cloud strategy after $140 million modernization appropriation

The Information Technology Budget and Policy Subcommittee heard an overview of the state's cloud strategy and a cloud‑readiness assessment that the Northwest Regional Data Center performed after the Legislature allocated roughly $140 million in fiscal year 2022–23 for cloud migration and modernization.

The assessment was funded in part by a $5 million appropriation to perform a cloud readiness study and a $10 million appropriation to move customer agency applications from the State Data Center to third‑party cloud services, Northwest officials told the committee. Warren Sponholtz, the State Chief Information Officer with the Florida Digital Service, told the panel that FLDS is working with agencies to advance the state's cloud policy and to provide technical guidance to agency teams.

Tim Brown, assistant vice president of the Northwest Regional Data Center, told the committee the center received application inventory data from 24 agencies and received information on 890 applications. Brown said the assessment evaluated latency, architecture, security requirements and whether each application met the state's business needs. "We looked at transition strategies," Brown said. He described the typical options — rehosting, replatforming, rearchitecting and retirement — and said agencies had proposed a mix of those approaches.

Brown said 34 percent of the surveyed applications were slated to be rearchitected and 21 percent to be rehosted. He said transition effort and risk were concentrated in the higher categories: "The highest two as far as transition effort were high and highest together at 46 percent," Brown said, and he reported 43 percent in the riskiest risk categories.

To manage risk, the Northwest report recommended a two‑phase approach: begin with lower‑risk, high‑learning transformations and then tackle higher‑risk, higher‑impact migrations. Brown summarized the recommendation as a first phase of lower‑risk applications and a second phase for higher‑risk items: "So we decided to approach it in 2 different phases." He said the Legislative Budget Commission subsequently made decisions about how to allocate the funds.

Sponholtz framed the policy rationale for cloud adoption: "The cloud is, in simplest terms, servers and computers that run in a different location" and it can provide scalability, flexibility and a shift from capital to operational spending, he said. He also cautioned that cloud migration carries costs such as subscription fees, storage and security management that must be planned and budgeted.

Brown told the committee the cloud‑readiness study focused on applications hosted at the Northwest data center and should not be interpreted as an inventory of all state applications. He said some agency applications already in third‑party systems, software-as-a-service products, or otherwise hosted outside the Southwood data center were not part of this assessment.

The Northwest report and the assessment's raw data were provided to FLDS and to the committee, Brown said. Committee members requested further cost and inventory detail to inform future planning and asked FLDS to continue coordinating enterprise‑level cataloging and interoperability work.