The conventional cloud migration advice is to start small and score easy wins. Figure out what works, experts say, and build your cloud skillset before trying anything difficult. But sometimes it makes sense to confront a larger challenge. Just ask the Massachusetts Department of Revenue (DOR), which started its cloud journey with GenTax — the agency’s biggest and most mission-critical application.
GenTax is a sprawling platform that helps Massachusetts collect levies on personal incomes, retail sales and a broad array of business activities, from renting hotel rooms to fueling vehicles. It also provides essentials such as analytics reporting, account management, interactive chatbots, commercial transactions, and refund/payment tracking.
“Whether it was file exchanges or interfaces with partners, GenTax had a lot of complexity, which allowed us to get a great feel for what a cloud migration might look like,” says Erin Botelho, Massachusetts’ deputy secretariat chief information officer.
The team had to address several questions: How would they transfer the workloads? How would the data be architected and managed? Who had the expertise to deliver a project of this scope? What had other government agencies experienced in similar cloud migrations?
To complete the project, DOR partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SMX, an AWS system integrator partner specializing in cloud migrations for highly regulated clients.
“Our partners helped plan our entire journey, keeping us on schedule to execute and deploy to the cloud in the timeframe we needed,” Botelho says. “I can’t imagine having done this without them.”
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