Georgia promotes chief cloud officer to CTO
The Georgia Technology Authority on Thursday announced that Dmitry Kagansky, formerly the state’s chief cloud officer, has stepped into the role of statewide chief technology officer.
Kagansky, who was appointed Georgia’s chief cloud officer in September 2021 and has also been serving as the authority’s deputy executive director, will continue to lead cloud migration efforts through the “newly reconfigured” CTO role, according to an announcement. Kagansky reports to state Chief Information Officer Shawnzia Thomas, a longtime state official who took leadership of the state’s technology enterprise last year.
In the announcement, Thomas cited Kagansky’s “experience and vision” and called the state’s cloud transition “vital.” Upon joining the state government last year, Kagansky had worked for at least nine tech companies over the past two decades, including the Ask Jeeves search engine and Quest Software Public Sector. His experience also included four-and-a-half years at Amazon Web Services, where he worked with Georgia state agencies, including its Department of Revenue.
Kagansky last year told StateScoop he’s hoping to dispel misconceptions about cloud computing among the agencies looking to move some of their services and data away from state-operated data centers.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions,” he said last October. “There are people who think the cloud is more secure. There are people who think the cloud is less secure. But the reality is that it’s as secure as the effort you put into it. With the cloud you do get a larger toolset but you do need to understand how to use it, when to use it. You get a lot more flexibility, but that’s also at a cost.”
According to the state’s announcement, Kagansky is also seeking to provide agencies “more varied technology services” and “more choice and control over their IT spending.”
“We want to connect agencies with technology that best enables their business,” Kagansky said in the announcement. “Rather than confining them to some finite slate of services we’re committed to, we want to be asking agencies, ‘What do you need?'”
Kagansky replaces Steve Nichols, who served as chief technology officer in Georgia for 20 years before stepping down last month.
