State of Utah Migrates Eligibility Software to FedRAMP-Compliant MongoDB Atlas for Government

Utah is one of the fastest-growing states in the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the Utah population increased by 18.4% (compared with a national average of 7.4%). As it grows, the state is leveraging technology to provide better services to people.

Utah’s Electronic Resource and Eligibility Product (eREP) software helps caseworkers determine people’s eligibility for benefits programs. Caseworkers access eREP for more than 60 social services, including food stamps, Medicaid, and childcare assistance. The application itself stores electronic case files and uses that information and a rules engine to calculate benefits.

The state’s Department of Technology Services had been using MongoDB Atlas as eREP’s primary database since 2016. MongoDB Atlas worked well for the state’s use case because it stores files using BSON, which allows for efficient storage and compression. This significantly lowers storage volumes — and thus costs — for the department’s databases. MongoDB Atlas can also store and retrieve large documents quickly — a crucial benefit given Utah’s higher-than-average family sizes, which can make individual case files up to 16 MB. In 2022, the department had around 15 MongoDB nodes and wanted to upgrade to a fully managed version of MongoDB Atlas as part of its cloud transformation.

Manoj Gangwar, Principal Data Architect, Department of Technology Services at State of Utah

In that same year, the governor of Utah mandated that the state migrate its IT solutions to the cloud to better serve Utah’s citizens. eREP had previously been hosted in a physical data center, so the state began migrating eREP to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in response to the new directive.

The Department of Technology Services had two primary requirements for the migration. First, as a government agency, it needed to use cloud technology that met the standards of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a federal compliance program that evaluates cloud services for security. Second, because the solution was so critical for caseworkers, the department wanted a backend database that could handle large documents and deliver results quickly.

The department was committed to keeping MongoDB as the database for eREP. “The biggest chunk of the eREP application is in MongoDB Atlas,” said Manoj Gangwar, principal data architect for the State of Utah. “MongoDB was a very suitable product for us to store all the documents that we create. We tried some other solutions, but they could not match MongoDB.”

In 2022, the Department of Technology Services migrated eREP to MongoDB Atlas for Government. MongoDB Atlas for Government is a secure, fully managed, FedRAMP Moderate-authorized product for United States government agencies to deploy, run, and scale MongoDB databases in the cloud. It provides the high-security standards that the State of Utah needs to comply with as well as eREP’s required level of database performance.

There was a challenge, however: MongoDB Atlas for Government was in the process of obtaining FedRAMP approval at the time of Utah’s migration deadline. Fortunately, Gangwar’s team found a way to keep MongoDB at the core of the solution. The department performed its first migration of eREP to self-managed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to meet the state’s deadline. Then, once the FedRAMP approval process was complete four months later, it migrated again to managed MongoDB Atlas for Government. “We didn’t want to lose MongoDB as the backend database: we were adamant on that,” said Gangwar. “So, we took the extra step of moving to EC2 just so we could retain MongoDB.”

The department also used Cluster-to-Cluster Sync, a solution that enables seamless, long-running cross-cluster syncing of real-time data, to ensure the migration ran smoothly. As an early customer of the solution, the Utah team helped provide feedback to MongoDB as it tested and improved the functionality.

“The reason we like working with MongoDB is their promptness,” said Gangwar. “They went above and beyond to help us, and we worked together to solve any problems.”

Now that eREP is running on MongoDB Atlas for Government, it returns results 25% faster than it did when data was stored on premises. MongoDB Atlas can handle the multiple layers of files and document embedding that the State of Utah uses as well as the large file sizes. “MongoDB is so responsive. Other database solutions couldn’t give us this functionality,” said Gangwar. “For our caseworkers, when somebody is standing in front of them, they want the software to return results quickly and not just keep processing and processing.”

Additionally, the migration created more efficiency for the department. “It’s much less cumbersome to maintain our databases now that we’re using fully managed MongoDB Atlas for Government,” said Gangwar. Database architects no longer have to manage shards, configurations, or load balancing; they can spend their time on more important developments, such as upgrading the rule engine at the backend of the eREP solution. They can also expand their cloud skills and explore new ways to use technology to serve the people of Utah.

The application also has faster disaster recovery capabilities on MongoDB Atlas for Government. On premises, restoring the department’s 10 TB backup could take up to 58 hours. Now, backups are automated, and restoring the databases in case of an outage takes less than five minutes. “We’re so happy that point-in-time restore is possible on the new cloud solution,” said Gangwar. “We have alerts in place if anything goes above threshold levels, and we don’t need to maintain manual scripts or switch over clusters; it’s all fully managed now.”

The State of Utah will continue to work to provide improved access to public services. “As public servants, my team is passionate to do work that directly impacts people’s lives,” said Gangwar. “We’re so delighted that with this work behind the scenes in IT, we’re helping 3.2 million Utah citizens, and we’re proud that MongoDB is with us as we help our customers.”

Manoj Gangwar, Principal Data Architect, Department of Technology Services at State of Utah