SO29 Consolidation of E-Mail Will Improve Services and Save the State Millions

E-mail systems for California's state government are fragmented and costly. Many large public and private sector organizations have consolidated their e-mail systems, making them more robust and less costly. The state should consolidate its e-mail services to provide a more secure, robust environment at a lower cost to the state.

E-mail is an essential tool for communication in government as in the private sector. The current e-mail system used by California government was purchased, installed, and maintained on a department-by-department basis. Like so many other state applications, what started as a good idea for a small implementation grew to proportions that are costly to maintain and at risk for failure and downtime.

In the 1980s, e-mail was just beginning to gain acceptance. The advent of wide area networks and, more importantly, the Internet, brought the ability to communicate and share files instantaneously to anyone in the world. Each agency began to develop their own e-mail infrastructure in a relatively limited manner adding users incrementally. Now it has become the preferred method of communication. This has led to an ever-growing number of servers, server space, and personnel needed to maintain each system. E-mail has also become the method of choice for citizens to communicate with government, further increasing demands on the existing e-mail infrastructure and security.

In October 2003, the California Department of Finance conducted a survey of state e-mail systems on a departmental basis. The survey included information about the number of servers, mailbox size, number of users supported, virus detection software and various other factors. Results from the survey showed the wide variety of e-mail systems that support the state, the cost of running those services and the complexity. [1] Approximately 100 surveys were returned to the DOF. An analysis by the California Performance Review shows that costs vary widely among agencies, with on-going costs ranging from approximately $144 per year, per employee to a high of $216. With an estimated 145,000 client mail boxes across state service, the total cost is estimated to be at least $21.6 million per year. This figure is consistent with analysis of other states' e-mail infrastructure costs.

As a result of the uncoordinated growth of e-mail in state government, these systems are increasingly at risk for failure, virus attack, lost e-mail and extended interruptions. As an example, the Love Bug Virus of 2000 affected thousands of computers, causing several departments to be without e-mail for days as staff tried to eradicate it from their e-mail systems. The California Franchise Tax Board was without e-mail for four days as a result. The loss in productivity and the need for staff at each department to eradicate this virus cost thousands of dollars in lost staff time and productivity. As departments have developed their own e-mail systems, they often did not have the funds to create redundant systems or adequate virus protection.

There are also no standards across departments, and there are often missed steps in adding security patches. This can lead to system problems and lost e-mail. Retention of e-mail is essential as it is considered a record of state activities and subject to public records act requests. Failure to produce e-mails when requested will cause distrust by the public. This makes redundancy, standards and security a necessity.

E-mail systems in individual departments also require a local management structure including information technology (IT) staff. Anytime there are new software patches or upgrades in software, operating systems, e-mail server, or other infrastructure, staff at each department need to do the upgrade. Thus, they are done redundantly across agencies, and changes may not occur simultaneously. In contrast, consolidated e-mail systems are developed with a standard infrastructure, upgrades occur in one place, software patches for security are implemented across the board in a timely manner and require less staff time to manage.

Studies in large organizations and other states support messaging consolidation as an appropriate strategy for improving security, management and reducing total costs of operations. The following are some examples:

• State of Utah-A centrally administered e-mail service administered by the state's Information Technology Services by an IT process group sponsored by the Governor of Utah and the State Chief Information Officer (CIO). The group proposed an immediate implementation. The principal deliverable will be a consolidated e-mail service that will reduce overall e-mail administrative and infrastructure costs to the State of Utah. [2]
• State of Indiana-In October 2003, Indiana established in policy a proposed single e-mail system for all agencies. The policy states, "Migrate all state agencies under a single e-mail system." The primary benefits of a consolidated statewide e-mail system are lower costs, improved service and tighter security. Additional benefits expected from the e-mail consolidation include common calendars and scheduling, increased productivity, remote access to e-mail via the Internet, and more robust virus protection. [3]
• State of Ohio-The Information Technology Services Delivery of Ohio offers Microsoft Exchange services for integrated e-mail and information management. The service allows agencies to take advantage of the organization and management of all e-mail, calendar, contact and task information using a single integrated application in a safe, secure and reliable infrastructure. Currently Ohio has approximately 9,000 users implemented on the consolidated e-mail infrastructure. Once fully implemented, the state of Ohio (59,000 e-mail clients) has estimated their consolidation savings as follows:
  1. Reduce servers from 460 to 20;
  2. Reduce e-mail administrators from 44 to 20; and
  3. Reduce annual cost from $11 million to $2.1 million. [4]
• State of Louisiana-The state will provide consolidated e-mail services for agencies under the authority of Louisiana's Act 772 at one or more of its consolidated data centers. This service will include the support of standard e-mail services including basic messaging, address book, scheduling of personnel and resources within and among departments and optional integration with the standard wireless service offered through the Office of Telecommunications Management. Thus far, 14 departments are using the consolidated e-mail service. [5]
• Oracle Corporation reported that consolidating its 97 e-mail systems world wide into a single, unified e-mail system, saved the company $13 million in its first year and $11 million in subsequent years. [6]

In 1999, the Employment Development Department (EDD) began migrating and consolidating its Microsoft Exchange environment to the Health and Human Services Data Center (HHSDC). [7] The goals of the project were to eliminate redundant and incompatible e-mail systems, provide support at an enterprise level, increase system availability, security and recoverability, and eliminate duplicative support work. In response to the goals of EDD's consolidation, the HHSDC did a study to analyze the merits of providing an e-mail service offering to HHSDC customers. The study found HHSDC could offer full featured Microsoft Exchange services to all departments regardless of size, at a competitive price. The study also found that, "HWDC's [HHSDC] messaging pricing is competitive when compared to other industry service providers and should be the primary choice for internal government customers considering the move to managed based e-mail solutions." [8]

Since the initial deployment by EDD in 1999, HHSDC has developed its messaging infrastructure to handle up to 32,000 mailboxes and is doing a migration to Microsoft Exchange 2003, which will be completed by July 2004. This infrastructure is robust enough to handle the needs of several departments in its current iteration, and, with the appropriate hardware and software purchase, can be scaled to handle statewide consolidation. Although this infrastructure has redundancy, additional consideration must be given to disaster recovery.

The consolidation of e-mail services in California state departments is in alignment with the direction of the state chief information officer. On April 30, 2004 the state CIO presented the Responsibility for Messaging Systems policy to agency secretaries and department chief information officers, who unanimously accepted it. The messaging policy provides that:

"Messaging systems are common technologies within the Executive Branch, for which the acquisition, technical and security management, and ongoing licensing will be consolidated for reasons of cost-effectiveness, improved manageability and security . . . The State CIO shall designate one or more agencies to assume responsibility for consolidated acquisition, technical and security management, and ongoing licensing of messaging systems for the Executive Branch subject to such conditions and oversight as the State CIO may require." [9]

Though consolidation is an obvious path most large organizations pursue, it is not entirely without risk. These risks may include:

• Different retention policies across agencies;
• Different remote access methods and policy;
• Different mailbox sizes;
• Application integration with e-mail preventing a seamless migration; e.g., the Pass-Through Entity tax application at Franchise Tax Board which requires Microsoft Exchange;
• Necessity of upgrades to related technologies (e.g., Active Directory, Windows 95/98 upgrade of desktops); and
• Potential of temporary interruption of existing e-mail function due to migration.

Recommendations

1. The Governor should direct all state departments and agencies to immediately begin migrating their e-mail services into the existing Department of Health and Human Services Data Center (HHSDC), or its successor.
   
2. The Governor should direct HHSDC to work with departments to develop the migration plan to include at least 20,000 additional mailboxes in Fiscal Year 2004-2005. A detailed work-plan should be developed identifying the departments to be migrated, the time-frame for migration, and all associated costs and savings identified, including existing server and staff redirection as needed.
   
3. The Governor should direct HHSDC, or its successor, to consolidate excess hardware infrastructure, where possible, to support all state e-mail accounts.
   As departments migrate from their existing, distributed e-mail systems, excess hardware should be redirected to HHSDC to scale the infrastructure for a larger number of mailboxes. A certain amount of hardware should be purchased for technology refresh and standards adherence. These costs are a part of the ongoing maintenance of e-mail and are significantly less than what each department would pay individually for hardware upgrades.

Consolidation of California state government e-mail services could save the state millions of dollars. The specific savings resulting from these recommendations cannot be fully estimated since the savings depend on the specific implementation plan developed and the detailed analysis of the equipment, software, and staffing currently providing these services.

Departments pay a significant amount of money to implement system security for e-mail. Consolidation will allow e-mail systems to be more secure, and will consolidate the security infrastructure, allowing economies of scale in the purchase of security infrastructure tools.