KLISS - a hybrid cloud success story

Kansas 2011 legislative session successfully completed with administration and support delivered on a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Download the press release.

What is KLISS?

Prior to the 2011 legislative session in the state of Kansas the process of drafting, proofing and introducing bills was primarily paper based and supported by an unsustainable legacy mainframe system. The daily printed bill books generated a considerable carbon footprint and the infrastructure needed replacing with a cost effective, scalable and open solution.

With the successful, on time and on budget, implementation of KLISS the Kansas Legislature has a comprehensive eDemocracy platform that covers all aspects of it’s function including law making, chamber automation, decision support and citizen services. All the legacy PC, mainframe and paper-based work-flows have now been successfully transitioned onto a consolidated hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Don Heiman, CITO Kansas State Legislature

“Utilizing a private cloud infrastructure for KLISS has reduced our infrastructure costs by a third.”

Bethann Pepoli, CTO, State/Local Government & Education
EMC Corporation

“Using this joint EMC-Propylon lab-tested solution, Kansas was able to extract more value from information during the live legislative session, leading to greater job satisfaction for the legislators, improved/faster delivery of democracy and lower operating costs.”

KLISS hybrid cloud

KLISS is built on Propylon’s flagship Legislative Workbench (LWB) product which provides all the internal business facing components: bill drafting, journals, calendars, statute update workflow etc., along with Intranet and Internet facing portals. The KLISS private cloud consists of a number of VMware machines running virtualization software split between the live site in Topeka and the Wichita disaster recovery facility. This multi-tenant virtual platform has facilitated separate “confidentiality zones” that reflect the internal organization of the legislature. The hybrid cloud architecture has also enabled greater budgetary and administration control. The storage layer is an EMC CLARiiON-based SAN with data duplication via EMC’s Avamar product.

The public cloud portion provides the Internet-facing website http://www.kslegislature.org. It is a one-way push replication of the part of the private cloud that contains public information and services. This portion also provides a RESTian API, allowing developers to consume legislative information and build their own information integrations and value-added components.

“KLISS is not so much a system as an eco-system”, says Sean McGrath, Propylon’s CTO. “All the critical aspects of a 21st century legislature have been catered for with the highest level of information integration and service consolidation. KLISS provides opportunities going forward for staff and public to expand and fully exploit all the possibilities of this truly ‘eDemocratic’ solution.”

EMC and Propylon delivering results

The challenges facing Legislatures and Parliaments around the world are immense. Many states are facing significant budgetary pressures while at the same time legacy mainframes and DOS/Windows applications are becoming unmaintainable. This presents serious business continuity risks, can hinder or increase the cost of integrating new processes and services. It can even mean increased costs just for maintaining the status quo. Significant opportunities will be lost if your systems cannot keep pace with the current and future state of web and mobile technology.

By deploying Propylon’s LWB on a hybrid cloud infrastructure from EMC, Kansas has taken a significant leap forward and mitigated many of these risks. The legislature is now well positioned to face into the many opportunities the decades ahead will bring in terms of IT. Big Data, data analytics, Geo-Informatics, multi-modal law-making, location based services and the mobile web, to name a few.

Moreover, the KLISS system has been designed to integrate with the Kansas Electronic Archive Initiative known as KEEP (Kansas Enterprise Electronic Preservation). Via an innovative, REST-based KEEP connector, documents of permanent and enduring value will flow automatically from the KLISS system into an OAIS compliant, tamper evident storage sub-system based on Propylon’s core LRMS platform and EMC’s Centera product.