State Treasurer's Office Boosts Security with Agile IT

Company: Georgia Office of the State Treasurer
Industry: Government, Finance
Employees: 25+
Overview: Responsible for all of Georgia’s finances and slowed by shared IT infrastructure, The Georgia Office of the State Treasurer imagined a complete digital transformation.
Solution: AgileAscend Office 365 migration, AgileSharePoint, AgileProtect cloud backups, AgileCover Managed Services

The Georgia Office of the State Treasurer manages a cash and investments portfolio of over $25 billion in assets and generated $21.9 million in interest revenue in 2017. The office supports every state and local government and agency. With a forward-looking concern for security and availability, Chief Information Security Officer, Bill Wyatt, has pursued a multi-year mission of digital transformation, enlisting Agile IT to do the “Gearing and Building” so his team can focus on their day to day accountability to the state’s 10.5 million residents.

While the overall goal of their digital transformation was responsiveness, with a lean team of four IT personnel supporting the 25 person team, the primary metrics for success are availability and security.

Availability

Availability is paramount, as each member of the team must be able to complete specific financial tasks multiple times a day. Managing over 100 accounts, including both investment and payroll, for various agencies and local governments it is critical the correct funds are in the right account at exact right time every day. Loss of access can affect critical functions including payment of teachers and other public sector employees.

Security

With $25 billion in managed assets and operating in compliance with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, “Security is our top priority as state treasurer”. This places the team at the vanguard of balancing security and productivity in an environment that has no margin for error.

Responsiveness

While operating under the Georgia Technology Authority’s (GTA) Office 365 tenant, the IT team lacked access to administrative tools and resources that they needed to assure the minute to minute availability their mission required. If a workstation went down, it could be a 3-5 hour window to get a response. While the GTA environment was purposely restrictive, the monolithic structure added an additional layer of risk as the Treasury IT team could not effectively respond to outages or potential security threats.

Understanding of the importance of their role, the team was highly strategic with a staged implementation plan, focusing on minimizing impacts to end users while gradually providing increased functionality across the organization.

• Stage 1: AgileAscend Agile IT performed a tenant to tenant migration from Georgia Technology Authority’s shared Office 365 tenant to a tenant specifically for the Office of the Treasurer, while assuring 100% uptime during the migration and maintaining or improving existing security posture.
• Stage 2: AgileSharePoint Agile IT created a custom designed SharePoint intranet to enhance team collaboration in a scalable and secure environment. The SharePoint instance was developed with a division focused architecture and baseline rights management policies to control the flow of sensitive information.
• Stage 3: AgileProtect Understanding the importance of business continuity, the Georgie Office of the Treasurer enlisted Agile IT to create and implement a secure backup solution that included asset discovery and inventory, back up and recovery planning and initial launch of the backup plan.
• Stage 4: AgileCover “We have an ongoing contact with Agile IT now, so throughout the year, if things come up, or if problems hit, we have a certain pool of hours we can draw up on as needed. With Microsoft and the pace in which change is occurring, it’s so rapid and so hard to keep up with even when focused on it. Agile IT is hitting it every day, and researching it, testing it, and that way we get the opinion of ‘Is it time to onboard that new service, or do we need to wait?’ The opinions of Agile IT are critical to helping us make good decisions about change.”