The State of Alaska completed the initial phase of a large-scale migration, expanding access to digital services for constituents. Alaska overcame legacy on-premises infrastructure by contracting with Microsoft to enhance modernization, security, and workforce development. This catalyzed the state’s rapid digital transformation and migration to Microsoft Azure. Alaska actioned a “migrate and modernize” pattern that has empowered its teams to focus on high-value efforts, not costly hardware replacement and service remediation. After migrating 700 applications and one-third of its infrastructure in just three months, Alaska is facilitating innovation and expanding access to secure government services—all while optimizing costs.
The State of Alaska had a vision to be an innovator in digital public services. The state, however, faced challenges stemming from its legacy on-premises infrastructure as well as its vast geography: some of Alaska’s major population centers are hundreds of miles apart and might only be accessible by boat or plane.
To achieve the state’s innovation goals, the state has contracted with Microsoft and begun a large-scale migration of Alaska’s internal and public-facing applications to Microsoft Azure. With nearly half of its on-premises servers migrated to the cloud, Alaska is positioned to provide enhanced digital services that are more accessible to people across the state as well as improved resilience, cost efficiency, and security. The migration has also initiated a culture shift: on Azure, Alaska is bringing agencies together and facilitating broader modernization to unlock added value and achieve a more accessible future for the government.
Connecting remote residents with important services and improving resiliency through an alliance with Microsoft
Occupying the northwestern corner of North America, Alaska is the largest US state, at more than 586,000 square miles in total land area. The state government provides public services from 15 departments to 730,000 people. However, the majority of Alaska’s infrastructure ran locally, and departments used multiple isolated systems, which hindered data transparency and collaboration. Administrators wanted to improve access to digital services and introduce innovative capabilities to keep up with the expectations of Alaskan residents.
The legacy systems were complex, inefficient, and costly. “There was inherent on-premises risk,” says Niel Smith, Deputy Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the State of Alaska. “Until 2022, the only fiber that ran to the state was marine fiber underwater. If it had a problem, nobody in the rest of the state could get to anything hosted in that region.” The state needed to improve the resiliency of its systems while overcoming geographical challenges.
The State of Alaska wanted to innovate in the cloud to reduce security risks and downtime and increase transparency and collaboration across departments while optimizing costs. In 2020, Governor of Alaska Mike Dunleavy initiated a digital alliance with Microsoft to enhance the state’s infrastructure and drive innovation. “We saw a lot of technology debt and challenges in front of us,” says Bill Smith, CIO of the State of Alaska. “The digital alliance with Microsoft reflected our desire to modernize the state’s services to better serve residents.”
The state had already been using some Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365. “The initial decision to use Microsoft as our partner for large-scale cloud activities was driven by the fact that most of our environment was already Microsoft related,” says Bill Smith.
Migrating 1,200 servers and 700 applications to Azure in three months
The project’s first phase involved evaluating two-thirds of the state’s approximately 3,000 servers to determine which should be migrated, shut down, or kept on-premises. After testing an application-to-application strategy that proved slow and costly, Alaska used a move and modernize pattern that empowered its teams to focus on high-value efforts, not individual applications. With this strategy, the state migrated the first 1,200 servers and 700 applications to Azure in just three months.
The state took advantage of support and new services from Microsoft to streamline this first phase of the migration. It worked with Microsoft Professional Services to stand up the initial landing zone. Then, it used Azure VMware Solution to migrate legacy VMware workloads. “With Azure VMware Solution, we did rapid migrations without making any changes,” says Niel Smith. “That was a critical technology that recently became available.”
It was important to have top-down support for modernization, and previously sporadic cloud adoption became widespread following the governor’s full endorsement. “Executive sponsorship has been crucial, and the administration’s focus on reducing risk to data and services has helped us make great progress quickly,” says Bill Smith.
This first phase of the Azure migration has spurred rapid innovation. The State of Alaska is reducing costs by consolidating infrastructure and decommissioning legacy systems. It is improving resiliency and reliability while strengthening security by migrating systems to Azure, where geography is no longer a challenge. Meanwhile, with data available from anywhere instead of stored locally, and with departments now using the same cloud services, the state is enhancing transparency. “Our transparency is so much better on Azure than it ever was, and it’s going to continue to improve,” says Bill Smith. “That also shows business owners how to use data to provide better services.”
Using the cloud, the State of Alaska is also expanding the ability of residents in remote regions to become full-time state employees while strengthening its security posture. It already provides customer identity and access management (CIAM) using Microsoft Entra for constituent access to government services. In an effort that ran parallel to the migration, the state activated CIAM and multifactor authentication for two-thirds of constituents—roughly 500,000 individuals.
In 2024, Alaska will finish assessing all legacy systems and migrating workloads to the cloud that were left until the second phase for compliance or contractual reasons.
Transforming into one of the first US states doing primarily cloud-based computing
Alaska has completed the first phase of a larger migration that would make it one of the first US states to do the majority of its computing in the cloud. It’s now in the second phase of its digital transformation. “As we move assets into Azure, other services have become available,” says Bill Smith. “We’re unlocking the additive value of all these capabilities and achieving best practices much more quickly.”
The State of Alaska’s vision of a flexible, accessible future for its government and people centers on this migration, and the breakthroughs it’s already achieved are just the beginning. The state is now positioned for rapid modernization and prepared to implement cutting-edge technologies to further improve its services and elevate its digital platform. “Migrating to Azure has empowered us to focus on the data and the meaningful changes that we can start making,” says Niel Smith.
“Our transparency is so much better on Azure than it ever was, and it’s going to continue to improve. That also shows business owners how to use data to provide better services.”
Bill Smith, Chief Information Officer, State of Alaska
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