Arizona Considers Law that Would Require Agencies to Use Cloud Computing

The State of Arizona is proposing a law that would require state agencies to migrate IT resources and operations to the cloud. The law, S.B. 1434, now awaits the approval of Governor Doug Ducey.

According to a report by InfoWorld, the law mandates that agencies use cloud computing, and if they don’t, CIOs could risk jail time for noncompliance.

The State of Arizona has already migrated its DNS solution to AWS, which saves it approximately 75 percent in annual operating costs on its DNS solution compared to its previous on-premise infrastructure.

The law states that departments must adopt a policy “that establishes a two-year hardware, platform and software refresh evaluation cycle for budget units that requires each budget unit to evaluate and progressively migrate the budget unit’s information technology assets to use a commercial cloud computing model or cloud model as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”

The rest of the text is fairly standard in that it will require government agencies to utilize resources that comply with regulations such as FedRAMP, HIPPAA, and PCI DSS to name a few. It also requires the cloud data to be stored in the United States.

Arizona CIO Morgan Reed told StateTech that Governor Ducey’s vision for Arizona is for it “to move at the speed of business. So the question should be, why not the cloud?”