Los Angeles Moves to California’s IT Infrastructure
Los Angeles
“We can only succeed better as we do more collaboration among all the government entities,” said the state’s CTO.
Los Angeles plans to move from local to state IT infrastructure when it switches from its mainframe to the one belonging to the California Department of Technology State Data Center.
The largest city in California expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensing and replacement of aging equipment, while alleviating its struggles filling vacancies left by rapidly retiring mainframe employees.
Based in Sacramento, CDT will provide round-the-clock staffing, hardware support, security, and disaster recovery services as part of its three-year, $10.5 million contract to update L.A.’s technology services.
Meanwhile, city Information Technology Agency staff will be freed up to focus on technology services, said Richard Rogers, chief technology officer with CDT.
“This just happened to be very strategic for both sides,” Rogers said. “We both provide services for the same constituents; we just do it at a larger scale than the city of L.A. We can only succeed better as we do more collaboration among all the government entities.”
CDT already has partnerships with about 80 non-state entities, including other local governments, for CALNET and telephony, he added, and the contract with L.A. will help sustain mainframe services.
The city’s transition also includes public safety workloads and has been in the works for several years while the technical teams on both sides considered service offerings and went through the procurement process. Coming up with a project plan is the next step, Rogers said, with the transition likely finished by year’s end.
“For the past five years we have strived to modernize operations through public and private cloud options,” said Ted Ross, general manager of ITA, in a statement. “The move to migrate away from our 30-year old legacy system to the state’s secure, cloud-based environment will greatly improve our ability to serve and protect the people of Los Angeles.”
The partnership will provide L.A. “a much higher level of security than what they have now,” Rogers said, alleviating concerns of both parties. L.A. has the option to extend the contract another three years.
Rogers called CDT including disaster recovery services in the agreement a “no-brainer.”
“That’s probably our most mature platform for services that we offer,” Rogers said. “We just naturally have disaster recovery down.”
Dave Nyczepir is a News Editor at Route Fifty and based in Washington, D.C.
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