Virginia ITA Completes Cloud Transition

The Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) has completed moving the Commonwealth of Virginia’s enterprise data center from a traditional site to a cloud-based platform, marking the culmination of a two-year project.

With the former data center site now sits empty, all 65 commonwealth executive agencies have migrated to the new QTS platform. The transition to a cloud-based platform required more than 50 move events and the transition of 4,500 servers and applications.

“This is a milestone to be celebrated. The data center move project has modernized Virginia’s data systems and provides a cloud-first roadmap for the Commonwealth’s information technology (IT) ecosystem,” said Commonwealth Chief Information Officer Robert Osmond in a press release.

“I’m especially proud of our agency and supplier partnerships that have made this project successful,” he continued. “Together we have achieved our goals on-time, on-budget, and are ready for continuous innovation.”

QTS is resilient, scalable, secure, and efficient, VITA says, with a 98 percent smaller footprint than its predecessor. It also provides standardization at a lower cost with the technology being 94 percent virtualized.

“The data center move project is our near-term strategy to provide the flexibility of cloud-to-cloud migrations and disaster recovery,” said Chief Information Security Officer of the Commonwealth Michael Watson.

“This data center migration was an important step in our cloud services strategy and adoption,” he added. “Moving forward, we will continue to strengthen our infrastructure by leveraging additional tools and capabilities now available to us.”