Mississippi Department of Revenue balances cloud modernization with security-first AI adoption

Public sector organizations are increasingly rethinking how they manage critical infrastructure as demands for always-on digital services and greater operational efficiency continue to grow. As government AI adoption accelerates alongside advances in cloud-native platforms, IT teams are modernizing legacy environments while maintaining security and public trust.

Organizations are taking a measured approach to AI, recognizing that the data they manage is not theirs to casually experiment with or potentially expose. The focus is on finding ways to create value from that data while being careful not to introduce unnecessary security risk, according to Mike DeHaan (pictured), chief technology officer of the Mississippi Department of Revenue.

“We’re really highlighting AI for our service delivery tools on our infrastructure side right now,” DeHaan said. “We’re using that to help onboard some of our earlier engineers to bring them to a more advanced kind of way to work with some of the big infrastructure that we have to work with.”

DeHaan spoke with theCUBE’s Christophe Bertrand and Alison Kosik at the Pure Accelerate 2026 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed strategies for building cloud-ready infrastructure and taking a security-first approach to government AI adoption. (* Disclosure below.)

Government AI adoption and guardrails

As organizations look to adopt AI, the concept of guardrails has become increasingly important for maintaining consistency and reducing risk. Everpure Inc. addresses that challenge through its Fusion platform, which enables teams to define standardized policies and workflows that less-experienced engineers can deploy with confidence, according to DeHaan.

“It’s a way for us to define standards for how we want to support our workloads with things like snapshot replication, immutable snapshots on those workloads, and how we provision it,” DeHaan said. “In a sort of prepackaged way, that I can hand that off to some of our newer people that haven’t worked with some of the larger systems before, and they can comfortably and confidently roll that out to service our taxpayers.”

The decision to modernize was driven partly by unexpected hypervisor renewal costs and the need for greater portability between on-premises and cloud environments. Mississippi has since moved to OpenShift with Portworx as its hypervisor hosting platform, achieving an 1,800% increase in storage requirements without disruption while reducing its server footprint, DeHaan noted.

“We’re architecturally aligning ourselves for that kind of mobility,” DeHaan said. “For those workloads we have deployed in the cloud, they can go on that same platform to the cloud as we will run our on-prem workloads on. It gives us fungibility to more effectively leverage taxpayer dollars with how we host our services.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Pure Accelerate 2026 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Pure Accelerate event. Neither Everpure, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE