 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Spu Miniman, your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space. And of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like. So really happy they were able to bring us. Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate the invitation to be here. All right, so technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. Yeah, absolutely. So in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in myriad of services for government to the citizens. And from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to serve as the citizens of the state. Excellent, maybe just talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the cloud or do you also have some data centers? Just gives a little thumbnail sketch if you would of what's under that umbrella. Sure, absolutely. I think you'll see at the state level, we typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection to public safety. You've got just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level. And so the central office, the Office of Technology services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then, of course, you have local government like in state of West Virginia with 55 counties and then your following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government whether it's local, state or federal. Yeah, that's such a good point. And right now, of course, there's a strain on everything with the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever. Maybe help us understand a little bit, things like work from home and unemployment I expect may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space that the last few months? Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first part, yeah, you get to work from home piece, right? West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country. And so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly. We put protections in place to help shore up and to prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do, right? COOP plans for the most part projected just picking up from the location you're working out to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work. So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then, how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective? And in addition to that, a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load and we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously, you think about certain services if I had them just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up. Do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of cloud always has been, well, I should be able to react immediately. I have, you know, in theory, infinite scale. So what has been your experience? You know, are there certain services that you say, oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the cloud? And if there have been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. Well, yeah, the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in. It was overwhelming. And what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting, whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics. We didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that, the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not gonna just call the numbers you provide, they're gonna call any number. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just because they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we needed to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the cloud might be a better option and would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, but could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. So am I understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit? We were in only, there were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale, this was the first large project around a cloud contact center and did to run the project from go live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. Oh boy, yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the nineties and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there. So yeah, tell us how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly because we knew we had to move quickly and then upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicated that selection and started working with both the cloud provider and the integrator to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can and then where we can't get the 800 number be the focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after the Amazon Contact Center or our integrator of Smartronics and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. Yeah, Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity. I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to someone, they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about, sounds like you've got everything in your municipality, so might not need to worry about governance per se, but I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the Contact Center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. Yeah, absolutely. I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security, it's understanding it's always a question of risk. If you're seeking first and foremost to put in security with the understanding that now, hey, we've put it in, we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer, because you're not gonna stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address. So that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, they're less computers on the hardened network, right? They're now either VPNN in or they're just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? Well, you gotta extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? Because the boundary now is a lot in a lot of sense and purposes of the account. But then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization. Look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely. That preest the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading but the cloud contact center absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability what this means as we progress down the road Will, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully cloud once people are moving back to the offices more? Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served putting them in the cloud giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required had we had to procure equipment install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability whether it's microservices or VMs or whatever all available just to need to be turned on and configured to be used it's just a there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, how do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. Yeah, I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years. Cloud, of course by its nature is the flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using but this was something that was unexpected. So how did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle and when it's when a government into the states under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that were we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the federal government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in the sense. I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board and what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted. So the advantage of cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch. We know how the speed of adoption in technology tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path? Yeah, I think it's, we're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen an opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface, and so that's going to be a big push and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look toward that, right, with the smart cities and smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID is basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together. Well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizen. Well, great, really, really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word, just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the cloud? Yeah, I think in closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component that understands what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is, and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders, understand their roles and responsibilities and make that happen. Unfortunately, I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the in-state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the in-state, and it's definitely a partnership. And the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's gonna have to get there under budget and on time. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. Best of luck with the project and please stay safe. Thank you for having me. All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.