Washington State Department of Labor & Industries drives cultural shift and achieves measurable cost savings with Microsoft Azure

The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) cares for the well-being of millions of workers and manages billions of dollars in Washington State’s workers’ compensation system. In 2023, L&I made the commitment to modernize its aging technical ecosystem and networks, largely composed of on-premises datacenters, and began collaborating with Microsoft on a “move and modernize” strategy to migrate its distributed servers and applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The agency was eager to complete the migration quickly and without disrupting its daily critical operations and business cycles. L&I used Azure VMware Solution to migrate entire server environments through carefully orchestrated waves that provided for incremental and measurable moves. This approach gave the IT team time to adapt to the change in technology and also united IT employees around a common goal, helping to improve the workplace culture.

Protecting 3.3 million workers by moving to modernize

L&I is a complex government agency in Washington State that helps employers meet workplace health and safety standards; ensures the safety, health, and security of more than 3.3 million workers; and administers the state’s vast workers’ compensation system. L&I also oversees an array of worker wage protection and public safety programs.

L&I’s large, complex computing environment was developed almost exclusively in house over approximately 45 years and relies on more than 400 distributed servers running over 200 applications and systems. The combination of aging legacy technical systems and on-premises infrastructure made it difficult to streamline and modernize technical operations in a cost-effective manner and attract and retain new IT talent in a competitive labor market.

In 2021, the Washington State legislature passed legislation encouraging state agencies to use cloud services to increase efficiency and resiliency, improve customer experiences, and bolster cybersecurity. L&I’s executive leadership recognized this opportunity to prepare for the future of technology innovation but knew it needed to complete its cloud migration rapidly to avoid disrupting daily operations.

In 2023, L&I decided to migrate networks, systems, processes, and applications to Azure and began strategic discussions with Microsoft leadership, seeking their guidance and expertise to make the migration successful. “Selecting Azure was a significant milestone for us, and a close partnership emerged between our agency and Microsoft that led us to success,” says David Marty, Chief Information Officer at L&I.

Achieving a complete cloud migration in just nine months

L&I and Microsoft established a phased cloud migration road map based on industry-established migration patterns to rapidly move on-premises assets to Azure. Migrating rapidly was crucial to avoid prolonged disruption of the agency’s technical environment, which could lead to overloading technical employees, unplanned change-control problems, and increased cloud software and storage costs. L&I set an ambitious timeline of moving to Azure in fewer than nine months.

With L&I’s existing VMware environment, deploying Azure VMware Solution was a natural choice. This solution allowed for incremental migrations that didn’t leave the environment unusable if only part of it was migrated. L&I abandoned the traditional approach of migrating technical environments one by one and instead migrated entire environments by segments, including full collections of servers, networks, data, and applications. To avoid disrupting business operations, L&I and Microsoft migrated environments in carefully planned waves, starting with about 10 virtual machines (VMs) and then expanding to approximately 75 VMs at a time. In this way, L&I migrated more than 300 VMs and used Azure Cloud Services to simplify application management and easily scale new environments based on business demand. 

The close collaboration between L&I and Microsoft allowed the agency to achieve its nine-month goal of moving servers to Azure. “Many agencies try to do it themselves without partnering with industry experts, and they don’t make a lot of headway, run into technical issues, and lose confidence,” says Marty. “With our partners, including Microsoft, we did it at warp speed and with confidence. It was just outstanding and so rewarding to see the IT teams rally around this effort.”

Realizing measurable cost savings and uniting hundreds of employees

With its computing environment largely in the cloud, L&I is already reducing legacy technical debt. It is continuing to modernize its Azure cloud platform to better achieve its mission without having to contend with managing on-premises datacenters. The agency is driving iterative system modernization by retiring, replacing, refactoring, and re-platforming applications with cloud-only capabilities, such as containers, using low-code/no-code solutions like Microsoft Power Platform.

L&I is realizing several tangible benefits from its successful cloud migration, including measurable savings on current operational costs, better predictability for long-term spending on computing needs, and improved infrastructure stability. The agency believes that its investment in an Azure-based environment will also reduce its carbon footprint, an important contribution to Washington State’s sustainability initiatives.

“From my lens as the chief financial officer (CFO) responsible for a $20 billion organization, spending transparency and cost containment is essential,” says Randi Warick, Deputy Director and Executive CFO for L&I. “Our move to the cloud provides a much greater level of reporting regarding our operational spending for computing services. Having this level of detail allows me to achieve better budget forecasting predictability.”

The agency’s workplace has also undergone a profound transformation and fosters a more inclusive, confident, and diverse culture. Its migration approach forged new partnerships among employees and aligned the collective thinking about what is possible in the cloud within an organization that historically ran as independently operating teams. The IT division, with over 260 employees and 50 contractors, was able to unify around the common goal of moving to the cloud. “It was an amazing experience to watch the employees, all with different technical responsibilities, backgrounds, and perspectives, working side by side with a 100% focus and commitment to supporting each other in achieving success,” says Marty.

Transforming government operations with public-private ventures

L&I’s cloud migration is merely the foundation of its ongoing digital transformation aimed at providing better services for its constituents. “It’s crucial for our agency to keep up with developments in technology to help us deliver higher-quality services for Washingtonians, and this move to the cloud helps make that possible,” says Joel Sacks, Director of L&I. “It’s an exciting road ahead.”

L&I has forged a trusted relationship with Microsoft and a collaboration that demonstrates the power of public-private partnerships. “These partnerships are a smart and strategic way for government organizations to innovate and quickly extend business capabilities to improve services,” says Marty.