Businesses and organizations have rapidly transitioned to intensify digital integration following COVID-19. And with the transition to digital adoption also came a rise of cyber threats. As a state organization, the existing cyber infrastructure at the California Child Support Services (DCSS) had impeded timely remediation of business continuity and was vulnerable to security threats. To meet changing business needs, DCSS engaged Microsoft Consulting Services to help tackle several challenges associated with their on-premises Child Support Enforcement (CSE) business system. Through Microsoft services, DCSS is now better able to meet their mission to enhance the well-being of children by providing payment services to Californian families faster than ever before.
“What started out as a shared vision, turned into the successful migration of the DCSS Child Support Enforcement (CSE) System to the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud. The key to our success was the highly collaborative team who focused on building a long-term partnership, using their diverse skills to overcome unexpected challenges and achieve business goals.”
Catherine Lanzaro, Chief Information Officer, California Health and Human Services Department of Child Support Services
In 1999, the California Legislature passed a package of bills which made significant changes to the organization, administration, and funding of the state’s child support enforcement program. This led to the creation of the DCSS whose primary mission is to collect from absent parents, and support payments for custodial parents and their children.
According to the 2021 U.S. Census Bureau, about 4 out of 10 children were born to unwed mothers where nearly two-thirds were born to mothers under the age of 30. Today, 1 in 6 children under the age of 18 – a total of about 12.7 million – are raised by a single mother. These alarming figures speak to the importance of the DCSS having an effective online system that would facilitate financial support that custodial parents require when raising a child.
Creating a resilient digital system to protect against risks
With the advent of COVID-19, many businesses and organizations migrated their systems digitally to adapt to the new normal. Along with this, FBI reports point out that cyberattacks have increased by close to 300 percent since the start of COVID-19. In 2021, most malware attacks took place in North America with over 80 percent executed as an automated bot attack.
With these concerns, the California Health and Human Services Department of Child Support Services saw the pressing need to modernize their digital infrastructure so that they would be able to ensure business continuity and safeguard against potential security risks.
DCSS partnered with Microsoft Consulting Services, migrating their on-premises Child Support Enforcement (CSE) business system to run more safely on the cloud with Azure – for overall improvement in performance, security, and to be equipped with disaster recovery capabilities.
Timely assistance to custodial parents and their children
Azure Cloud was found to be the right choice for DCSS to help improve its ability to serve the financial needs of California children and families more effectively and promptly, thereby improving children’s quality of living.
As this project was the first ever CSE application that was to be migrated to Azure in the US, Microsoft put together a cross-functional team with wide-ranging skills and knowledge. At its peak size, Microsoft had a team of 33 people on the project, working closely with DCSS to ensure its smooth migration.
Even though the pandemic hit the project at the time of kick-off, the team was able to pivot from working in the same physical space to collaborating remotely on Microsoft Teams. In less than two years, the first DevTest was conducted and by January 2022, the CSE application was running entirely in Azure. The Microsoft Consulting team also had to navigate complex IRS and governmental compliance requirements while concurrently managing multi-state agency stakeholders, involving multiple third-party vendors.
Despite challenges, Microsoft strongly believed in DCSS’s critical mission of promoting well-being of children and self-sufficiency of families and was dedicated to seeing to its success.
Guaranteeing reliable infrastructure for the future of DCSS
The project led DCSS to realize significant cost savings for the future.
More importantly, the Azure cloud infrastructure has drastically improved their ability to serve the needs of California children and families through a more efficient payment process while at the same time eliminating technical debt and poor functioning infrastructure. Now that the system has migrated to Azure, any future need for modernization could be done easily by adopting cloud native architecture and processes.
“Microsoft is a world-class collaborator in cloud solutions. They are focused on partnering organizations wholeheartedly and have proven to be a good partner to DCSS. We knew that by migrating our system to the cloud with Microsoft, we will achieve our organizational goals. We are starting to see acceleration in our service delivery which ultimately means that we will keep up with the pace of our purpose – to better serve the public and families in California,” added Catherine.
Being the first CSE application to run fully on Azure across the US, this will also pave the way for other state agencies to modernize with Azure, demonstrating that applications hosted on other on-premises services can be successfully migrated to Azure.
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