North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts - May2021

NCAOC

North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts winds down mainframe and moves to hybrid cloud

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DIGITAL REPORT 2021

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NCAOC

North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts winds down mainframe and moves to hybrid cloud Anthony Whitmore explains the two key priorities for the NCAOC as it decommissions its mainframe and scales up its hybrid cloud network

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nthony Whitmore has lived a unique ‘double life’ at North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC), and the Chief Technology Officer is now tasked with managing two divergent priorities in 2021.

Having worked at NCAOC for 32 years, he left in 2017, only to come out of retirement and be re-appointed CTO, as NCAOC made a strategic decision to outsource application development. With this second tenure, IT stakes have been raised. As a statewide 100- county migration to the cloud gets underway, mainframe decommissioning will begin.

“We must continue to manage this legacy mainframe over the next three years as we build out more counties, every few months, to our new case management system,” Whitmore explains. “We’re going to be managing two business continuity efforts, one gradually decommissioning and the cloud gradually increasing.”

By winding down the mainframe, NCAOC benefits from cost avoidance on its current infrastructure which can be applied to nccourts.gov

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STRATEGIC PARTNERS • Presidio, a leading US IT solutions provider, is NCAOC’s Value Added Reseller.

• NCAOC is partnering with CISCO with the design of the hybrid Cloud, based on SD-WAN (Software Defined Networking Architecture). It is assisting NCAOC’s team in the rollout of the network infrastructure across the state –replacing 10,000 devices across the state this calendar year.

• Texas-based Tyler Technologies – the largest provider of software to the US public sector – provides metrics enabling NCAOC to have a better understanding of how people are using its case management system, e-filing and licensing, and access to justice.

• Microsoft has greatly assisted NCAOC designing its identity and access system, which is in the implementation phase. It will allow NCAOC to have more automated user accounts, and drive account creation.

Identity and access will allow NCAOC to have federated identity services capability with its business partners.

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SaaS rollout and engagement. “We won’t be purchasing a 100-county infrastructure – this way it’s more scalable and cost effective.

Some of our applications are still based on mainframe and we want to get off it, for cost effectiveness and resource management. Five counties will be cloud based by the end of the year.”

Key strategic partner Tyler Technologies, the largest provider of software to the US public sector, was chosen as application hosting vendor, and the Texas-based firm has been selected as NCAOC’s case management vendor too. “We had to create a technology strategic plan, to see how we get to be where we need to be for this new cloud hosted integrated cloud management system. There were lots of transformations, and we designed the network to support hybrid cloud.”

NCAOC

ANTHONY WHITMORE TITLE: CTO COMPANY: NCAOC INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: NORTH CAROLINA, USA

With 2020 spent in the design phase, implementation is about to start. The statewide rollout for an initial application replacement will complete in April and a second statewide application replacement effort will complete in the May time frame. At that point some mainframe services will gradually be wound down. The bulk of application replacement will occur with sub-sets of counties being migrated to the new ICMS starting in July of 2021, with an incremental number of counties being migrated through 2023-24.

Each county rollout will allow for mainframe service decommissioning.

The new hybrid cloud network aims to be completed by October, covering 250 sites across North Carolina. “Hybrid will provide us with a more robust, resilient, scalable and secure network infrastructure, as the case

EXECUTIVE BIO

Anthony Whitmore is a skilled IT strategic governance and project management leader.

With over 20 years of service as a manager and most recently as the director of infrastructure operations, he currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer for the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts. Overseeing a multi-year transition from on-premise data and service applications to cloud-based hosted technology, Mr. Whitmore is dedicated to the NCAOC eCourts mission of expanding access to justice across North Carolina.

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We guide you from initial assessments, strategy and consulting – to implementation and deployment – to managed services that run IT for you, topped off with a suite of flexible financing and consumption options to simplify procurement.

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Presidio: Keeping North Carolina safe

From cloud to physical and virtual IT infrastructure, Presidio is the digital integrator of choice for America's busiest public sector organizations.

The pandemic has led to many activities now becoming virtual-first, and this includes judicial services. This led to the North Carolina Administrative Offices of the Court partnering with Presidio, a digital systems integrator to implement a SaaS case management infrastructure and telejustice capabilities.

Originally brought in to consult on the NCAOC’s incumbent third party solutions framework, Presidio used the opportunity to really integrate with the court’s infrastructure on a consultancy level and evaluate their vendor partners, so the NCAOC could make the best decisions for their preferred infrastructure moving forward.

Speaking of the challenges faced, Presidio VP of Digital Solutions Rob Kim breaks it down to two important factors – funding and talent. Presidio works with public sector organizations on the legislative level in order to justify government spending and fund issuance, as this is a critical step in ensuring that projects see the light of day. Another is the constraint around the talent needed to support newer digital and cloud native technologies in addition to prioritizing investments in training for the current IT resources to manage and maintain the digital solutions that are deployed. Understandably so, public sector IT departments are busy

'Allowing integrators like Presidio handle the operations also means that organizations can now go back to focusing on their priorities.' prioritizing traditional infrastructure needs over IT or cloud operations as this isn’t their sole focus.

What a company like Presidio really does is it adds a layer of expertise to an existing infrastructure along with the right ‘service approach’, which means supporting the organization from a grassroots level all the way up rather than trying to sign them off with a cookie-cutter solution.

Allowing integrators like Presidio handle the operations also means that organizations can now go back to focusing on their priorities.

Learn more today

NCAOC

1965

Year Founded

10,000 Number of Employees

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NCAOC

“ Hybrid cloud will provide us with a more robust, resilient, scalable and secure network infrastructure.”

ANTHONY WHITMORE CTO, NCAOC

management system moves to a paper-less system,” he said. “The projects on the books right now are going to take us well into 2021, potentially into 2022.”

Microsoft is another key partner, as NCAOC moved from an on-premise email system to O365 across the state. “We completed that effort in 2019, moving to cloud-based email, and replaced all of our difficult file-based infrastructure with Cloud storage – OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. That was a foundational technology to integrate with the case management system.”

Acceleration into eCourts era The Office365 migration proved fortuitous as it allowed NCAOC to respond quickly to COVID-19 and provide teleworking capability, although the acceleration did present legislative challenges.

“The pandemic threw us into ‘e-Courts’ quicker than we anticipated. The adoption rate for video conferencing, to replace typical court processes and some of the legal aspects, has accelerated our effort, and we’ve seen over 1,000% increase in video. We’re probably not going to revert some of our processes back to in-court, because of the efficiencies and effectiveness of video conferencing.

“We deployed infrastructure in response to COVID-19 that was originally destined for the ICMS – the Integrated Case Management System rollout, which saw us replace desktops with 3,000 laptops, giving core personnel the ability to work from home,” Whitmore said. With an eye to the future, and the new case management system, they are now a ‘mobile workforce’, enabling them to work in the courtroom or at home. Through federal COVID funding, NCAOC purchased infrastructure that nccourts.gov

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NCAOC

Anthony Whitmore: Customizing products to meet North Carolina’s AOC requirements

“ We’ve seen over 1,000% increase in video.

We’re probably not going to revert some of our processes back to in-court, because of the efficiencies and effectiveness of video conferencing.”

ANTHONY WHITMORE CTO, NCAOC

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enabled creation of more immersive courtroom proceedings, encompassing cameras, large monitors, with integrated speakers and microphones, to allow the judge, prosecution and defense to talk to remote witnesses and defendants.

“We have the courtroom AV infrastructure in place but don’t plan to implement it until the latter part of this year, and intend to expand wireless,” he said. “Currently we offer it in the courtroom only and will expand it across NCAOC offices to provide a more mobile experience. In the future, wireless will allow us to incur cost savings by reducing switchport counts.”

As a CISCO partner, NCAOC also has Webex in place, which offers another

NCAOC

benefit when moving from in-court appearances to video conference solutions.

Whitmore added that NCAOC is looking at online tools to monitor digital courtrooms, to be proactive and predictive, and know when devices are about to have issues.

NCAOC has also worked with partners in the Executive Branch and public safety, to test and integrate their respective video solution infrastructures, negating the need to transport prisoners to the courthouse.

There is also opportunity to partner with local police departments across the state.

Heightened security and risk management With cloud technologies, and in adhering to state statute, security initiatives are paramount. “We brought on a new

Chief Information Security Officer, Risk Management Officer and Privacy Officer, and adopted a Security Governance structure based on national standards – and that’s allowed us to create our security framework to be able to support service level agreements with Tyler Technologies and Microsoft, and other Cloud business partners,” says Whitmore.

“The security office has been expanded with other personnel; I want to make sure they’re capable of auditing and monitoring our operational security, to ensure our network ops and infrastructure teams are compliant with all policies, and all our vendors are compliant with our procedures too. We put a strong emphasis on Risk Management to make sure we’re nccourts.gov

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NCAOC

“ The pandemic threw us into ‘eCourts’ quicker than we anticipated.”

ANTHONY WHITMORE CTO, NCAOC

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NCAOC

NCAOC STRUCTURES • There are 3 branches of government in North Carolina – Executive, Judicial and Legislative • NCAOC is the administrative arm of the Judicial Branch • NCAOC supports all 100 counties in North Carolina

compliant internally and externally.

NCAOC has also purchased AWS storage infrastructure where we will be piloting some NCAOC-owned and managed storage infrastructure and an application.”

“We are going to have to evaluate our field support resources, because we’re moving to paper-less court system and with the new technologies, we are going to need to assess our ability to support 100 counties across the state.”

A third party program management team is tasked with managing all risk, to ensure data conversion that we’re migrating off the mainframe is being carried out on time and customized with Tyler applications. “We attempt to mitigate risk by hiring the external project managers, so everything is seamless,” said Whitmore.

In the meantime, training is being stepped up, predominantly online. “We started the e-Citation last year and will continue to train officers this year. It will take magistrates six months to be familiar with e-Warrant applications, and training will be mostly online through Tyler.”

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North Carolina Administrative ` Office of the Courts 901 Corporate Center Drive Raleigh North Carolina 27607

T 919 890-1000 | nccourts.gov

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