Gov. Spencer J. Cox, State Attorney General Sean D. Reyes, and State Auditor John Dougall recently announced their respective appointments to the newly created Personal Privacy Oversight Commission (Commission). The Commission was created by the Legislature during the most recent legislative session.  

The purpose of the 12-member Commission is to develop guiding standards and best practices with respect to government privacy. The Commission will also recommend minimum privacy standards for governmental entities for the Legislature to consider codifying into statute. Commission members will work with the new Government Operations Privacy Officer and the new State Privacy Officer, reviewing specific government privacy practices recommended by these privacy officers. 

DTS will be hiring the new Government Operations Privacy Officer in the coming weeks. 

Governor’s Appointments:

• Quinn Fowers: Director of information technologies & digital services, Weber County — member who, at the time of appointment provides internet technology services for a county or a municipality;

• Aliahu “Alli” Bey: President, Haight Bey & Associates, CEO, Totem Tech —  member with experience in cybersecurity;

• Nayana Penmetsa: Engineering manager, Plaid — member representing private industry in technology;

• Keith Squires: Interim chief safety officer, University of Utah — member representing law enforcement; and

• Chris Koopman: Executive director, The Center for Growth and Opportunity, Utah State University — member with experience in data privacy law.

State Auditor’s Appointments:

• Matthew Weller:  President, All West Communications; Board Member, Executive Education Advisory Board, University of Utah – David Eccles School of Business; Board Member, National Cable Television Cooperative — member with experience in internet technology services;

• Amy Knapp: Former VP-Information Security and Compliance, O.C. Tanner — member with experience in cybersecurity;

• Brandon Greenwood: CISO, VP Security & IT, Overstock; Board Member, SL|CISO — member representing private industry in technology;

• Phillip J. Windley, Ph.D.: Principal Engineer, Office of IT, Brigham Young University; Founder and Organizer of Internet Identity Workshop and author of Digital Identity — member with experience in data privacy law

• Marina Lowe:  Legislative Counsel, ACLU of Utah  — member with experience in civil liberties law or policy and with specific experience in identifying the disparate impacts of the use of a technology or a policy on different populations.

Attorney General’s Appointments:

• Jeff Gray, Utah Office of the Attorney General — member with experience as a prosecutor or appellate attorney and with experience in civil liberties law; and

• Mike Smith, Utah County Sheriff — member representing law enforcement

At the Utah Digital Government Summit in June, the CIO named the 2021 Best of Utah Award winners. Watch the presentation here. Congratulations!

Overall Award / Visionary Award

Best Use of Social Media

Best Emerging Technology

Best Partnership

Best Use of GIS

Best Use of Data

The Division of Technology Services (DTS) has recently appointed Mark Schultz as the new Director of Agency Services. Mark will oversee the IT Directors to enhance the services DTS provides to our partner agencies by focusing on:

• Creating strong agency partnerships by strategically aligning technical objectives with agency business goals
• Becoming a trusted technology partner
• Adding value to state agencies by applying a disciplined approach to services delivery

Mark is a self-motivated and progress-driven technology professional with an extensive background in the industry. He has been with the State of Utah for 18 years and has been an IT Director for over 9 years. He has a long-standing record of initiative and innovation, and he has developed and executed strategies that have brought value to the State of Utah. 

The IT Directors, along with Mark, will take the opportunity to improve partnerships and seek out better methods to achieve more reliable and faster results for your organizations. Our goal is to improve communication and IT services for state agencies. 

Thank you for your continued support.

The Information Technology Plan is an overview of the agency IT project detail for the current year. DTS utilizes the IT Plan data to identify potential multi-agency use, necessary IT services needed for successful completion of the projects, and a cost breakdown for each project. See it here.

Following the successful migration of the DMV system at the Tax Commission to the AWS cloud in October of 2020 we began the process of moving GenTax, the agency’s primary tax application to the AWS GovCloud in January of 2021.  This process was tied to a quarterly release of the GenTax application and involved creating each environment just in time for its use in the development and testing phases. This was done to minimize the need for dual environments and to make sure development and testing occurred in the new environment.  The new production environment was created in May to allow for testing of all connections and interfaces.  Over the weekend of June 11th 2021 production data was moved to AWS and verified along with a testing of system functionality.  On the morning of June 14 all users were live in the new production environment with only minor glitches.  

Benefits

One of the primary benefits of being in the cloud is redundancy.  Production GenTax runs with database and application servers spread across multiple AWS data centers with automated failover built in.  Data is replicated in real time so the loss of a server or even a data center would be a minimal disruption. The freedom to quickly and easily scale is another major benefit.  Resources can be added or removed as needed with costing adjusting to match.  This allows us to respond easily to the seasonal nature of tax administration and right-size the environments for any conditions.  Enhanced security is also a benefit.  Isolating the application in its own virtual private cloud means that access can be even more limited and secure than what was done on premise and locating it in GovCloud means that it was built to meet stringent requirements from the ground up.

Cost

The goal was to move to the cloud without increasing cost for the agency.  Server by server costs are between flat and a 20% savings for the agency.  After we have stabilized and run for a few months we can implement additional savings opportunities available from AWS and by shutting down servers overnight when they are not being used.