Legacy technology systems often pose many challenges for organizations. With a 24-year-old COBOL-based mainframe system, Utah’s Department of Human Services was facing several obstacles: high costs, problems finding talent to maintain the platform, and, above all, difficulties in innovating.

To address these issues, the State of Utah decided to modernize its information technology and relied on Deloitte Consulting LLP to kickoff the process: transforming its mainframe system for Child Support and Third-Party Liability Medicaid Recovery into Java and deploy on Amazon Web Services. The fully automated Deloitte solution, powered by innoWake, earned the “Best Migration Solution” award from Amazon Web Services Inc.

“We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization,” said Bart Mason (pictured, right), technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. “And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. It was a system that served us well, but it was time to try and figure out ‘what are we going to do about this?’”

Mason and Omer Enaam (pictured, left), application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They discussed the technology issues facing the Utah Department of Human Services, why Deloitte’s solution was best suited to its needs, and the next steps in its IT modernization. (* Disclosure below.)

Unlocking digital transformation

When Utah began looking for ways to take the Child Support application off the mainframe, one possibility it considered was to completely rewrite the app, which could reach over $200 million, according to Mason. In addition to the high cost, the rewrite would take many years and would have to be recertified by the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, D.C., another lengthy process.

“The risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time,” he said. “The other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies.”

The option presented by Deloitte and chosen by the State of Utah was to use an automated coding data conversion approach that takes legacy programming languages like COBOL and converts them into Java while keeping the system running the same way with no issues with business continuity and additional training for employees.

“We have unlocked the potential of digital transformation,” Enaam explained. “[The State] can build mobile apps in front of that application … there are new analytics capabilities so that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen, they can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes, and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time [and] more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way.”

Another feature unlocked by this process that is essential to Utah is disaster recovery. With all the data connections located in one place and the tools available on AWS, it is easier to spin up servers once they go down, for example, according to Mason.

“Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We had no data connections; all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do,” he pointed out.

The State of Utah also plans to use AWS Batch, new databases, microservices and containers.

“Moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers and on an EC2 instance, but then we look and say, ‘OK, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient?” Mason concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE