Benefits of the Cloud in the Public Sector

Tyler Podcast Episode 36, Transcript

Our Tyler Technologies podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Host and Content Marketing Director Jeff Harrell – and other guest hosts – highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give us listen today and subscribe.

Episode Summary:

Cloud or "the Cloud" are popular buzz words, but what do they really mean, and how are they helpful for the public sector? Russell Gainford, Vice President of Cloud Strategy and Operations for Tyler Technologies joins the podcast to help us understand what the cloud is, and what problem it is helping solve for local, state, and federal government agencies. Russell uses a great analogy to help us understand the benefits of the cloud, and helps us understand why it is important to move clients to the cloud on a timeline that works best for their individual situation. He also tackles topics like cybersecurity and cloud best practices during this very informative episode.

Transcript:

Russell Gainford: You could conduct an entire modernization optimization efforts for your solutions in your own private centers as they exist today, but it's going to cost you more ongoing to protect those resources, replace them, and to optimize them without using what the cloud is already providing you through industry best practices.

Jeff Harrell: From Tyler Technologies, it's the Tyler Tech Podcast, where we talk about issues facing communities today, and highlight the people, places, and technology making a difference. I'm Jeff Harrell. I'm the director of content marketing for Tyler Technologies, and I'm glad that you've joined me.

Well, a popular buzzword right now is cloud or the cloud. So today, we are going to dig deeper into what the cloud really is and what problem it is helping solve for local, state, and federal government agencies. To help us do that, we turn to Russell Gainford, who is the vice president of cloud strategy and operations for Tyler Technologies. Russell has a technology focused background and extensive experience with public sector entities. He is responsible for Tyler's cloud strategy and operational maturity model for all of its public sector software solutions. And he is focused on the future direction of connected communities in the cloud. Russell enjoys working very closely with clients to improve their civic services and keep communities safer. And as you'll hear, has great insight into the benefits of the cloud and how it helps government agencies of all sizes. But without further ado, here's my conversation with Russell Gainford. Well, Russell, really excited for you to join the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Russell Gainford: Thank you, Jeff. Excited to be here.

Defining the Cloud

Jeff Harrell: I thought we could just start with a bit of a baseline. Because we throw out the word cloud and the cloud a lot, so I thought we could start with just defining what is the cloud and what problem is it addressing for public sector agencies?

Russell Gainford: That's a really good point. You hear that term cloud, which is really ... it's really short for cloud computing. And it is a buzzword. It's kind of, in my mind, a buzzword of a few years ago. Similar to my favorite buzzword today, which is artificial intelligence, which gets thrown around for many things that aren't artificial intelligence. But if you look at the cloud computing, it's really ... all it is, is that you're running software and you're running services, and the infrastructure underlying that supports them, and you're running it over the internet.

Another word that's commonly used for that is public cloud versus a private cloud that you may own internally to your organization. It's made possible, the cloud, as it exists today, it's made possible by virtualization technology. So it's the ability to take hardware and to partition pieces of it and allocate pieces of a server or an instance to multiple different uses. So you may have X number of computer chips and memory, and you're breaking up that set of resources into smaller bits that you can serve multiple customers with, or run multiple applications with if it's in your own private cloud. So when you hear the term cloud, at its absolute basic, what you're saying is, "I'm running machines and software that I need over the internet."

Now, the second part of your question, what is it addressing? This is sometimes a lively topic of, what's the primary values that it's providing? But the way that I like to look at it from a higher level is to look at a competing area. What's interesting in the United States is that as recently as about a hundred years ago, many private companies had to manage and build up their own type of grid for electricity. That it wasn't something that they could easily cap into as you do today. It's very similar to, if you look at private homes today, those that are still on well water versus being on city water. If you had to build your own electricity infrastructure and grid, or you had to tie in and dig your own well and run through that expense process, what are you doing? You're putting up a lot of money up front and you're trying to redo or rebuild something that somebody's already got in place that you could easily reuse.

So when you're using the cloud, what you're really doing is you're tapping into best practices and not trying to build something yourself, or redo something yourself. It also provides you the benefit, just like when you're on city water, just like when you're using something from electric utility, that you're paying as you go. You're not investing a large amount of money up front, but you pay as you consume services. Does that make sense?

Jeff Harrell: Yeah, that makes total sense, Russell. Is that problem the same across all levels of government, in other words, for local, state, and federal agencies?

Russell Gainford: That's a really good question. There are different levels of burden or requirements on an agency, in the public sector, that the public cloud helps with. So in certain areas like public administration or permitting licensing, there's things that the cloud can help you with. But for areas like the federal government or public safety and courts and justice, there's additional levels of compliance burden that are actually often pushed down onto the hosted infrastructure and operations of the compute.

What I mean by that is, if you are a federal government organization and you are conforming to things like the FedRAMP standard, which is now becoming something, what they call the StateRAMP standard in the future, as well as criminal justice information systems, CJIS requirements, there is a lot of burden on you as the host of that infrastructure to conform to those compliance requirements. Well, by moving to the public cloud, you can move to a shared responsibility model, which means that the public cloud vendor can take on a lot of that compliance burden for you, and you can do the smaller piece of that, which is the operational aspect of using that data and intelligence.

So the way that I would answer your question, from a baseline is, the higher level of compliance that you've had to manage inside your own private data centers and clouds, for those departments, the public cloud can really reduce a significant amount of burden for you.

Jeff Harrell: I know at Tyler, we have been really focused on helping our clients move to the cloud on their timeline. We've got clients that are further along than others. I just like to kind of hear from you, why is it important that we work with our clients to move them on their timeline, not ours?

Russell Gainford: Well, what are we doing here at Tyler? Right? We have a mission that we want to empower the public sector. We want to be able to help our customers create smarter, safer, and stronger communities. So we, as a partner, and consulting with our customers, we see the ships in the market towards the public cloud. We are investing, heading in that direction. However, like all technology shifts, they are not done in a vacuum and they're not done immediately as a pivot in a point in time. And trying to take certain workloads, certain products, certain areas that are not Tyler products and move them to the cloud for our customers, if they're looking at their own data centers, can be time consuming. It can cost more. So we know that customers are not going to be able to just move everything at once. And we know a lot of products that they have inside of their own data centers have interfaces to each other.

So the way that we look at it is that we are not forcing anybody to move to the cloud, and we are supporting our customers. We will consult and partner with them over time. When they're ready to move to the public cloud with all or part of their solutions, we'll be there to support them and work together with them, just like we have in the past.

The Effects of the Pandemic on the Cloud

Jeff Harrell: With that in mind, I know things were headed towards the cloud, towards this public cloud, but something happened in the world. We had a pandemic. I'm just wondering how the pandemic impacted that, and have we seen kind of a step change towards the cloud or an acceleration?

Russell Gainford: Yes. I would say we definitely have seen that. It's interesting, from a psychological perspective, from many studies that have been done, they say that crisis, whether it's individual, where you live, your hierarchy of needs, crisis itself is the biggest driver of an organization's and society's cultural change. So the pandemic certainly brought about a lot of that. They said from December, 2019 to June of 2020, so a six month timeline, that the percentage of the remote workforce during the pandemic, it grew from 7% in December of 2019 to 42% in June. Think about the amount of shift and the burden that hit the technology teams immediately as these individuals and these workforces need to be moved to remote.

I remember reading some feedback and some changes that needed to occur in the city of New York, as they had to move and find iPads for students and move all of their staff that typically only had access within city buildings. In Alexandria or Virginia last year, they had the first 911 call center in partnership with AT&T and FirstNet that ever existed with people working at home. People were actually able to take 911 emergency calls from home. It was the first time that's ever happened.

So, now things have shifted a bit. We have more folks that are returning to work. We have people that are partly in process. But what's come out of that change, what's come out of the pandemic is that many of these organizations have realized that why they need that safe and secure access to these products. There's ways to provide that now over the internet, and their staff really do need the ability to get in and do work where required, as well as citizens that they serve need more access to more tools and more utilities as a service from these jurisdictions. You're going to see them going through that transition in a much faster pace than perhaps they would've before the pandemic.

Jeff Harrell: I would imagine expectations of constituents have changed quite a bit as well. I know for lunch today, I'm working from home right now, and I wanted to order some Thai food. So I went, I just Googled Thai food near me. Went to their website and I couldn't order online. So I went to a restaurant that I could order online just so that I could drive up and they would bring it out to me. So I would imagine the expectations of people through this pandemic have changed as well. Has that changed for the way they interact with government?

Russell Gainford: Oh, it certainly has. I mean, it's driven a lot of expectations to be able to access more services remotely. That's something that has not always been a very frequent ability within jurisdiction, especially in some of the smaller jurisdictions. So you used to see payments would be a primary service that would be provided, but now you're seeing more full over-the-counter services and permits and licenses. We've done some work in the courts and public safety with more remote access, public data, FOIA records, all of that information. These citizens are expecting to be able to access that information, and at least complete a certain number of steps in the regulatory processes over the internet, without having to go to city offices, especially multiple times, in many steps over a single process they're on.

AWS Cloud

Jeff Harrell: Russell, my understanding is that Tyler has signed a strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, to provide our clients access to the cloud, the public cloud you've been talking about. What is superior about hosting in the AWS cloud, in particular, and why should this matter for Tyler clients?

Russell Gainford: Well, there's the industry leadership and recognition. But I mean, the reality is that if you look out as of last year, four in 10 public sector agencies were already using or building a hybrid cloud strategy, which means they're moving some of their private cloud to the public cloud. Or moving a significant amount. So for many of these agencies, it's not like they're not already working individually with cloud vendors for some of their needs, within the public sector. The cloud is helping them scale on their own internal infrastructure, in their own internal IT systems.

So us at Tyler, we really worked and we researched, and we believe that after a multiple aspects review, that the partnership and collaboration between Tyler and AWS provides our customers the best of both worlds. What I mean by that is they get the leader in public sector technology. That is coupled with the leader in cloud technology. We believe that would provide the best benefit to the market. And we're now seeing that this collaboration agreement is providing improved technology solutions, and that the support capabilities that AWS provides, that we can leverage to support our customers, is serving them and is serving their constituents better. That's why we believe going with AWS as a market leader was the right choice for our customers, and for the public sector market in general.

 

The Cloud and the Government

Jeff Harrell: We've done several podcast episodes really focused on cybersecurity. I know it's a hot topic. We see it a lot in the news. It's top of mind right now. I'd love to know, what is the intersection between the cloud and cybersecurity? How can the cloud make governments more secure?

Russell Gainford: You asked an interesting question earlier around the pandemic accelerating the move to the cloud. I would say, if you asked me about that acceleration versus cyber security and ransomware, I believe that the real acceleration that drove the larger amount of change in a short period of time has been cyber security. The radical increase in ransomware attacks that occurred in state and local government in 2019, and moving forward, really drove a new, refreshed look, whether it was the city of Atlanta, the city of Baltimore. Multiple large-scale cyberattacks that made these jurisdictions stop, and say, "Do we really want to be managing our own computer servers and internal infrastructure?" They started moving to the cloud quickly.

So when we look at that intersection, what it's providing you, is it's providing you a shared responsibility model. Where previously, if you were a large city or a small jurisdiction, you needed to have the expertise on hand to make sure you had the right patch schedules and that your hardware environments were being replaced correctly. And that all the information that you're using is properly secured and you're keeping up to date with nefarious actors that have large numbers of skilled resources that are trying to get into your system. By going with the public cloud route, you shift some of that expertise and some of the hardest portions of that protection over to the public cloud vendor. You can focus more on the users and who has the authorization to your environments, and you can protect the business side of your systems and let the public cloud vendor handle more of the hardware and the infrastructure side. It makes a lot of sense. It's a lot of synergies. And to me, that's been the biggest driver towards public cloud adoption.

Jeff Harrell: As governments are looking to modernize, they want to optimize their operations. We talk a lot, Tyler about connected communities. Can governments really, fully modernize and optimize operations without the cloud?

Russell Gainford: That's a good question. It kind of goes back to that example I was saying before of, can you manage with your own water and your own electricity? Well, yeah, you can get some level of service out of that. There's some level of modernization and optimization that you can get. Now, if you're not even willing to open to the internet and use best practices services for artificial intelligence and data analytics, and things like that, you are going to be hampered by it. But there's a large degree of services you could use on your own. But you know what? It's a lot more expensive to do. So you could conduct an entire modernization optimization efforts for your solutions, in your own private centers as they exist today, but it's going to cost you more ongoing to protect those resources, replace them, and to optimize them without using what the cloud is already providing you through industry best practices.

Jeff Harrell: Well, then Russell, how is the cloud facilitating these insights, these recoveries, these modernizations that are leading to better community outcomes?

Russell Gainford: Well, I mean, if you look at this at some of the high levels, previously, each of these jurisdictions, these lines that are drawn, these agencies, were managing their own sets of data, using their own third-party products. All of a sudden, with the internet and with these public cloud providers, a lot of that information can be shared more quickly.

I'll give you an example with the state of Connecticut who created an open data platform. They're one of our Tyler excellence award winners. They took this open data platform, this ODP platform they call, and they were able to reach out to these other agency services, the Department of Health, the social services, corrections, development services, and many other state agencies. They were able to create a unified data platform in the cloud with AWS. Where they're able to provide key information on COVID and the pandemic, and the changes in the statistics that was taking place across the entire state. It was a very valuable set of data. They saw an eight to 10 times crease in use of that data. But where it really provided them value in the cloud is the schools.

So the schools, who are trying to make key decisions, because these decisions based on in session, at home is made at an individual district level, all of a sudden these schools could get this data. Along with that came what they termed at the state, a school learning model indicator. Which was originally adapted from a publication in the Harvard Global Health, Path to Zero and Schools publication. What they were able to do with that is look at this information, take that health guidance for the schools and make really great decisions based on the information that the state had provided. Without the public cloud, without the ability to keep that data up to date real time, these jurisdictions, these schools would've been making these decisions in a vacuum. A lot of benefit came out of the use of the cloud there.

Jeff Harrell: I love that example, because we actually had Pauline Zaldonis on the show, episode 35, from the state of Connecticut, talking about how they did that. So if you want to hear a little bit more and dig a little bit deeper, I would refer you to episode 35 of the Tyler Tech Podcast. Well, Russell, any other examples that you can share besides the state of Connecticut?

Russell Gainford: Well, another one that's a little different from a data sharing, but really is about providing additional services as a government is, I really like to look at a product that we built out there with our virtual court system. This is a product where we looked at the way that access to justice is done today, and some contingency factors that may affect citizens and their ability, or even folks that have to work from home. We partnered with Alvin, Texas and built an AWS native product called our Virtual Courts product. It integrates with their case management system and the workflows that are in there. When they came to us, we were able to take this product and turn it on for them in less than 24 hours, up and running, integrated with their case system. So now all of a sudden, citizens that maybe had childcare, or somebody that has a parent at home and is not able to go into court to defend themselves on a violation, all of a sudden can do all of that in a virtual setting.

When Alvin, Texas, did this, what they found is not only were they able to provide that remote and virtual interaction, that aspect to their constituents, but they were able to do it faster. So they were able to eliminate what was essentially, before turning it on, an 800 case backlog that had built up within their jurisdiction. They were able to drive that down and get more constituent access.

And then there's reducing the failure to appear. Many folks do not appear from some of those circumstances that I brought up. But by allowing them to do it virtually, they reduce the failure to appear by over 60%. A huge reduction in follow-on paperwork and travel time, and things of that nature that help them also reduce additional manpower and costs. So that's a great solution, where the cloud brought a new service to the public sector, that improved the lives of citizens and was all done using cloud-based technology.

Jeff Harrell: Russell, I love that example because I'm a big baseball fan and Alvin, Texas, is home of Nolan Ryan. For those who aren't as old as I am, he was a great pitcher who had, I think, five no hitters. So yeah, Alvin, close to the Houston area here in Texas.

Russell Gainford: Big Nolan Ryan fan.

Jeff Harrell: Well, awesome. He threw very quickly. So to kind of pivot off that idea, if an agency is looking at accelerating or pivoting quickly towards the cloud, what's some good next steps for them.

Russell Gainford: Well, of course, any of the agencies that we partner with across the country, we are always happy to talk to them about what we're doing and partner with them on the journey that they're taking. But there are multiple areas of consulting and expertise out there as they look to move to the cloud. There's frameworks, cloud adoption frameworks through AWS that guide you with documentation and abilities to start adopting for the cloud and doing that in phases. There is multiple articles and publications, because many folks have already gone through this. So the way that I would approach it, if you're interested in that, is that you can develop your own strategy that includes a hybrid cloud strategy.

Going back to pivoting. If you have data centers today as an agency, it doesn't mean everything's getting shut down or moved in a year. You can start to look at new procurements in the cloud. You can look at the next upgrade as a possible vantage point for a new product to go into the cloud. So it's a gradual strategy and a roadmap for your organization, to take you from where you are today to the cloud.

Now, the one thing that I would bring up with that is don't forget about the culture changes. So having everything on site or in your private cloud, your culture is going to change as you look to the public cloud and you're relying on SaaS-based services. So make sure you take the time and you invest as an organization in the training and the culture changes that are required to go along with this journey.

Jeff Harrell: Well, that's great information, Russell. If someone wanted to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Russell Gainford: Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm on there all the time. Lots of activity going on in the tech markets. Fairly active in that area. Also, I'm on Twitter, @rustygainford is my handle on there. Yeah, anytime feel free to reach out to me. Always interested in talking about the cloud and where the industry's going.

Jeff Harrell: Russell, well, thank you so much for this amazing information. I appreciate you joining the show.

Russell Gainford: Thanks, Jeff. Anytime. Thank you.

Jeff Harrell: I hope you enjoyed that episode. I know I learned a lot and understand the benefits of the public cloud much better. Also loved his analogy of well water versus city water. Also, I needed to correct something I said. I did Nolan Ryan a disservice. He actually had seven no hitters, not five. So sorry about that, Nolan. Well, I'd love to ask you, if you enjoyed this episode, to please subscribe. We drop a brand new episode every other Monday, on a variety of different topics that surround the public sector. But until next time, this is Jeff Harrell, director of content marketing for Tyler Technologies. We'll talk to you soon.