When the Maryland Department of Human Services decided in 2017 to move the systems it uses to run the state’s benefit programs to a cloud platform, it could have gone with a “lift and shift” strategy, literally copying the files on its old physical servers to a virtual environment. But John Evans, the state’s deputy chief technology officer at the time, said that wouldn’t have solved the problem of the agency’s case workers having to switch between a half-dozen applications in supporting Marylanders who depend on state-government servers.
“We literally had workers who would have to swivel between six different systems,” Evans, who is now the state’s chief information security officer, said last week at an Amazon Web Services conference.
