The COVID-19 pandemic put pressure on state governments to rapidly deliver unemployment benefits to citizens whose jobs were eliminated or paused. Citizen outreach methods like online registration and call centers could not handle the volume of requests. In hindsight it was time for state and local governments to start modernizing unemployment benefits.
For those state agencies that could rapidly deliver on citizen expectations, their common denominator was a cloud infrastructure built to scale workloads based on demand. In addition, cloud-based systems can go a long way in fighting pervasive unemployment fraud, resulting in considerable cost-savings for state and local agencies.
These were the key themes of part three of the American Rescue Plan video podcast, hosted on Government Technology Insider, where William Sanders, Director of US and Canada Cloud Strategy for Oracle Government and Education, discussed this topic further. Sanders also previously served as the CIO for the Kansas Department of Labor, where he led a successful initiative to streamline the state’s unemployment claims process.
“The pandemic has taught us that the cloud can make unemployment claims processes flexible enough to scale applications and systems, while also being managed remotely,” said Sanders. “When systems and workloads are on-premises, states are taking advantage of cloud computing using test and dev environments when they want to innovate, while also taking advantage of analytic capabilities for better decision-making. When it comes to countering fraud, cloud technologies can better match claimants with the data that identifies them, and look for overall anomalies.”
Listen to the full video podcast below:
*This video series was recorded in the spring before the formalization and passing of the American Rescue Plan Act. As such our subject matter experts refer to the American Relief Plan in the video.
Click here to listen to Part Four of the “American Rescue Plan” Video Podcast Series.
