With the start of the new fiscal year, the Indiana Office of Technology is sharing the new FY 2020 rates for its services. The technology industry is always changing; providing fluctuation for IT products and usage. IOT, a revenue-neutral agency, has always made it a priority to maintain excellent services while working to minimize rate increases. This year, some rates will be reduced, while others will increase in order to offset increased IOT costs. On average, rates are increasing by 2.4%. Some products specifically that have increased rates include data exchange software, SEAT and database services. Other services, such as storage & backups, virtual machine hosting and disaster recovery will have reduced rates in FY 2020. The largest driver of this increase is because of a change in Microsoft licensing with the Office365 products. In order to be properly licensed, the state must spend an additional $11.4M compared to previous agreements over the next three years, costs that must be shared amongst all users. There are many benefits that agencies will see, including new features from Microsoft, which will be rolled out in more detail in the coming months, vFire ticketing system moving to a cloud-hosted solution – which will save the state money, while adding new functionality – and the development of an adoption center, which will assist with product launches and also answering basic user questions. Additionally, IOT is creating a Billing Ombudsman who will be reaching out to agencies later this year to guide them through the process of reducing their IT costs. The IOT service catalog details each rate, the associated services and the agency metrics. This document is a central place to find information about services provided by IOT, including how to: request a service, request help if you have an issue with a service, monitor the progress of your requests, resolve billing issues and how to terminate a service. IOT is a revenue-neutral agency that operates on a charge-back model; it does not make a profit from its services. To figure out ways to potentially reduce an agency’s bill, IOT has a billing dashboard to graphically represent agency spending and provides tips on reducing usage. If you cannot access the billing dashboard, the agency Financial Manager or Controller should contact their agency’s security coordinator to request access. |
Splitting Storage and Backup costs
As was IOT policy, personal drives and shared folders were not charged for backups; that will also be changing. Users are still granted 10GB each as well as 1GB for each employee for shared drives. Any overages on both of these types of storage will still be charged the standard $0.25 rate, but there will be an additional rate for overage backups of $0.21 per GB – totaling $0.46. To help offset these costs, IOT will be commencing a project to move people’s home drives to OneDrive, which comes with 1 terabyte of space. That will eliminate much of these problems and save agencies money. Shared drives will remain where they are for now. |
New Data Exchange Services team
IOT has realigned a few of its products to be under the governance of one team that is focused on your needs of exchanging data between systems, other agencies and those external to the state. Effective July 1, Secure FTP, Managed File Transfer, and BizTalk will be managed by the IOT Data Exchange Team.
Data exchange services provide great value, but until now, excluding SFTP, IOT has absorbed the costs to deliver these products. After analysis through this budget cycle, and to support ongoing software and infrastructure costs, there will be a nominal per month charge for ongoing usage of Data Exchange Services. For SFTP users, to reduce downtime and ensure the service properly works, IOT is requiring test environments for all connections.
Please note that this nominal charge includes the licensing and operations support that you have enjoyed to date for existing integrations, but NOT the development of new integrations. Based on the assessed level of effort, there could be a charge for the development of new integrations according to the rate table below.
Service/Resource | Rate |
BizTalk Services | $750 per month |
Managed File Transfer (MFT) | $575 per month |
Secure FTP (SFTP) | $35 per environment (QA/Prod), per folder, per month |
PSC Project Manager | $110 per hour |
BizTalk Developer | $125 per hour |
MFT Analyst | $110 per hour |
To best meet the needs of customers and due to the growing demand of services, IOT is making some small changes to how tickets and projects are handled. In some instances, such as office moves and server requests, multiple IOT teams are involved in delivering a solution. In an effort to provide more consistent project management concepts and more thorough completion, effective July 1, IOT is utilizing its Project Success Center to manage these type of requests.
How does this affect me?
- If your agency needs IOT to help establish a new remote location or move to a different remote location, the request should be made through the Project Request Form.
-Tickets that get directed to the Solution Delivery Team will be evaluated on intake. Some of these ticket requests are actually projects and the customer is going to be asked to complete a Project Request Form.
Why is IOT making this change?
These changes will result in a more consistent delivery of our services and allow technical staff to focus on delivery and the Project Success Center to handle the necessary coordination. The Project Success Center, following standard project management techniques, has processes in place to ensure that projects are more effectively managed.
What makes something a project?
Some examples of a project are; if there is a software upgrade, new processes being deployed, or launching a new application. Examples of items that would not be a project are; small proofs of concept or adding a new web server to an existing server farm.
Make sure to register for Google Analytics
Starting July 1, Google Analytics is going to be state agencies’ analytics tool.
All historical data on SiteImprove Analytics will be maintained for at least another year and it will have data up to June 30, 2019. The SiteImprove Quality Assurance (broken links, misspellings and web compliance) module will continue to be available. Agencies such as DLGF use the weekly automated Quality Assurance emails to quickly learn if there are any broken links or misspellings on its website. If you are not taking advantage of the powerful Quality Assurance component, let IOT know, and we can provide access and training.
Google Analytics is the industry standard when it comes to tracking websites and applications related to page views, user activity, and demographic information.
Google Analytics can provide insight on what your most popular pages are, how long people are visiting your site, the number of downloads for documents, the type of browser being used, and much more. Google Analytics gives you access to user-friendly dashboards, historical data tables, realtime visitor activity, all with the ability to quickly generate reports that can be shared with non-Google Analytics users.
For more information, click on a link below:
* Training - Video recording of training session
* IN.gov documentation (PDF) - Instructions for State employees on how to access and use Google Analytics
* Request access or tracking
* Request Google Analytics training
IOT recently developed a new website which provides a live, broad overview of how IN.gov is being utilized.
Powered by Google Analytics, this new site is accessible at https://analytics.in.gov/, where one can find all of the top-viewed government pages, showing how many users are on government websites currently, and the past 90 days.
The analytics update every minute, and show what devices people are using, what browsers they are in and what operating systems, such as Windows, IOT or Android they use.
You can view the top 20 most-visited pages and the top 20 downloads from pages across state agencies too.
You can download all of the data you are looking for here.