The State of Alaska has nearly completed its cloud migration.
Thus far, the state has moved more than 700 applications from its own data center footprint into the cloud without any interruptions to its services, reports StateScoop.
Alaska's chief information officer Bill Smith announced the state's progress during the National Association of State Chief Information Officers conference earlier this week.
In order to conduct the migration, the state has assessed all of its technical assets and many services have been migrated to hybrid environments. The cloud provider wasn't named. A previous announcement from the governor's office suggests the first phase of the migration took around nine months.
Smith told StateScoop: “I’d like to say there’s a there’s a secret sauce to it, but really, it was just a lot of hard work from some really dedicated folks to do that assessment, look at the latency requirements of all of these platforms, and make some decisions about what was appropriate to move at this time, what was appropriate to continue to work on, and then what really by design needed to stay on-premise.”
The state, now that it has a "large percentage" of its resources in the cloud, is looking to move into a more steady-state modernization effort, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools which can be taken advantage of via their now established vendor contracts.
“I’m really excited about our ability to responsibly move forward quickly as we start that AI journey,” Smith said. “While we’re doing that, we’re building all of the bigger, larger scale governances for the more complex use cases. I think we’re going to be in a good position to increase our maturity very quickly and provide good, responsible AI tools pretty rapidly to our citizenry.”
The cloud migration process has been conducted over two phases, with the second and final beginning in January of this year. The state has not shared which "industry-leading partners" it has used for cloud computing services. None of the big three cloud providers have cloud regions located in Alaska.
The State of Alaska's Office of Information Technology (OIT) website suggests it has data centers in Juneau and Anchorage, from which it offers on-premise and cloud hosting services.
According to DataCenterJournal, Alaska has three other data centers in the state, two operated by AlasConnect and one by Heritage NetWorks. GCI also has a data center in Alaska. Far North Digital, LLC also claims to be developing a data center in Prudhoe Bay.
In December 2023, construction began on a cable landing station in Akutan, Alaska for the Aleutians Fiber Project that will offer 2.5Gbps consumer Internet speeds, unlimited data, and 'urban-level plans' to local residents in the island chain within the state.
