In FY2021 and FY2022 the Division of Technology Services (DTS) charged a public cloud rate of cost + 25%. The additional 25% was for support and other charges related to administering the cloud. Starting in FY2023, DTS will be billing customers of public cloud at actual cost (which includes the shared portion of vendor support costs). This will simplify billing for agencies and clarify costs for public cloud. Agencies will see this change on the August 2022 bill. 

• Q – What is a Public Cloud?
  • A – Public Cloud is on-demand computing services and infrastructure that are managed by a third-party provider and shared with multiple organizations using the public Internet. 
• Q – Which Public Cloud providers does the State of Utah use?
  • A – In use today are:
    • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
    • Microsoft Azure 
• Q – How does an agency pay for services with Public Cloud? 
  • A – At the end of each monthly billing cycle, DTS receives a bill from the Public Cloud vendor. This bill is paid directly by DTS back to the vendor. Simultaneously, a billing feeder file is generated from CloudHealth (our billing product) to divide out all costs to the appropriate billing units. This feeder file then generates a monthly bill that the agencies receive. This bill is paid by the agency directly to DTS to recover the above costs. 
• Q – What are Public Cloud costs?
  • A – Costs to agency customers are:
    • Direct costs for services from Public Cloud vendors, via the bill from DTS as described above
    • A monthly charge of 1.65% of total spend in cloud by Elcid for the use of CloudHealth and its services (Billing, Cost Optimization and Reporting)
    • Public Cloud vendor support charges. These are charges billed to DTS for Enterprise Support in AWS, Premier Support in GCP, and a future Azure support tier. Each ELCID will be billed based on the percentage of consumption. 

• Q – What does the $1 charge on tiered rates pay for? 
  • A – Cloud tools and resources
    • eg, AWS Shield Advanced, Terraform Cloud, Shared infrastructure
• Q – When do these charges take effect?
  • A – You will see these charges starting on DTS August Bill run on Sept 6th 
    • This will be for charges from July 2022  
• Q – How will these charges appear on my bill from DTS?
  • A – Cloud Health will show on the bill as 6516:Cloud Hosting and Storage Services. Drill down on to the detail level and it will show “Other”.  Then the Service Description will show “Cloud Health Charges”. 
  • Public Cloud will show on the bill as 6516:Cloud Hosting and Storage Services. Drill down on to the detail level and it will show “Other”. Then the Service Description will show “AWS Support Charges”, “GCP Support Charges, or “Azure Support Charges”. 

If you have any questions, please contact your IT Director or DTS Billing at dtsbilling@utah.gov.

The Department of Government Operations Rate Committee will be meeting on September 15 to consider the proposed FY2024 DTS Rates. DTS will be proposing a couple of rate changes, and will be presenting the rate impacts to the committee during this meeting. You can see more information on the rates here. 

We successfully completed the exit of the Salt Lake data center June 1, moving all state applications, network, and servers to the new Taylorsville facility. Work continued over the past couple of months to decommission and remove the old IT equipment from the data center located at the Capitol complex. We removed and destroyed over 3,000 hard drives from servers, ensured all inventory was accounted for, powered down all old servers and network gear, and filled truckloads of old equipment for surplus. 

On August 1, DTS officially handed over the keys to the old data center to the Capitol Preservation Board and the Division of Facilities and Construction Management. Demolition of the old data center and construction of the new building at the Capitol can now begin. 

The brand new data center in Taylorsville has many benefits, including:

• Security improvements:

  • Enhanced data encryption at rest technology

  • New secure Private Cloud 

  • Updated security management capabilities

  • New more robust security features on firewalls

  • Installed a new environmental system to protect against physical, environmental or human threats that can cause disruption or downtime to IT infrastructure

• Network improvements: 

  • Moved and increased the Internet to 100 Gb of bandwidth including new network equipment

  • Refreshed hardware and software

• Hosting/Server improvements:

  • Refreshed equipment with associated increased processing and security components

• Application improvements:

  • Upgraded databases

  • Moved 25% of applications to the cloud

  • Applications now have backup and redundant features

• Print Center improvements:

  • New printers with enhanced features and less downtime

• Phone improvements:

  • Additional redundancy and higher throughput for calls

Thank you to all DTS employees and agencies for your support throughout this tremendous project. 

The Cabinet Security Council has recommended that DTS implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all UtahID public accounts on August 22, 2022. It is imperative for the state to maintain security and privacy of citizen data and account information. MFA provides an extra layer of security for all state accounts. The use of MFA is an industry best practice and aligns with NIST, the national security standards that the state follows.

Agencies will not need to take any action. DTS will adjust the UtahID login screen with specific instructions for public users to select the MFA method (either enter an email address or mobile phone number) on their accounts. Any citizen who currently has a UtahID account will be prompted to add MFA to their account when they login to their account to access state services.