GTA Migrates Portal to the Cloud for Big Savings Using AWS Services and TekStream Support

GTA delivers IT infrastructure and managed network services to agencies and departments throughout Georgia. GTA’s portal application connects multiple state agency applications and supports a variety of workflows for government employees and residents.   

Prior to the migration, GTA needed a large footprint of servers in a data center to run its portal application, making it challenging to adapt because of the infrastructure size and cost. Leaders across Georgia wanted to start migrating state workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud to modernize technology and processes. “Georgia takes pride in being on the cutting edge of evolving technology and its impact on our economy, government, and daily lives,” said Governor Kemp when recognizing the Department of Revenue’s cloud migration. GTA chose to be one of the first, migrating its portal application to AWS and laying the groundwork for a comprehensive cloud strategy that the rest of the state could follow.   

GTA started working alongside TekStream in September 2021, putting together the strategy for the Portal migration before starting to build. GTA stakeholders worked closely with subject matter experts at TekStream to make decisions collectively and build a migration road map for the Portal. GTA and TekStream started migrating infrastructure to the cloud in January 2022 and completed the portal migration in September 2022. “When you make a plan and understand all the key elements, it’s much quicker than using short sprints where you need to redo steps,” says Troy Allen, vice president of cloud services at TekStream. “If we hadn’t done the work up front, the project would have taken twice as long.”

GTA received funding and support from the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive cloud migration program that uses an outcome-driven methodology developed by migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud, which helped the organization invest extra resources in the planning process. “Because of funding from AWS MAP, we could dig a little deeper than budgets typically support,” says Allen.

Because GTA doesn’t receive funding from the state legislature, the organization must be cost conscious. Previously, GTA spent nearly $300,000 a year to keep environments for the portal running in a data center. The organization saves 60–70 percent in infrastructure costs using AWS services because it doesn’t need physical technology for the portal anymore. To make the infrastructure efficient, GTA and TekStream analyzed usage and matched applications to the appropriate container sizes. Using Amazon EC2, GTA can flexibly scale and turn off an instance when it isn’t needed, which keeps costs down. “This project was successful, met its timelines, and has been very cost efficient for the state,” says Chuck Robinson, section director at GTA.

Uptime and speed are also critical for the portal to support large customers like the Georgia Department of Public Health. Using cloud capabilities, GTA can better manage resources and prevent unplanned downtime. For example, instead of experiencing a failure if a backup runs out of space, GTA can scale based on needs using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—a collection of managed services for setting up, operating, and scaling databases in the cloud. GTA hasn’t experienced a single unplanned downtime since migrating the portal. “Using AWS services, we can size our solution better and tune the environment to an application’s needs,” says Robinson. “Our customers have been very happy and haven’t seen an outage.”

Using AWS services, GTA also has more visibility for security. GTA can adjust its security model based on environment needs using services such as Amazon GuardDuty, a threat-detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activities and delivers detailed security findings.

By migrating the portal to the cloud, GTA has access to features that facilitate agility and innovation and weren’t possible on premises, such as auditing and security capabilities. GTA uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, to manage backups, data stores, and file sharing in a centralized location. Using Amazon CloudFront, which securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds, GTA can manage its subnetworks and remove its web servers for the portal. “We can take advantage of built-in AWS tools and can link to external tools,” says Robinson. “We don’t need to build a framework and can start using tools right away.”