Mississippi revenue department adopts security-first AI approach while modernizing cloud infrastructure

Mississippi is rethinking how it manages critical IT infrastructure as public demand for always-on digital services grows. The state's Department of Revenue is modernizing legacy systems with a security-first approach to AI, treating taxpayer data as a resource that cannot be casually exposed or experimented with. Mike DeHaan, the agency's chief technology officer, outlined the strategy during the Pure Accelerate 2026 event.

"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."

Standardizing infrastructure through guardrails

The department uses Everpure's Fusion platform to define standardized policies and workflows. These guardrails let less-experienced engineers deploy workloads with confidence, reducing the risk of misconfiguration. The platform governs snapshot replication, immutable snapshots, and provisioning in a repeatable, prepackaged format.

"It's a way for us to define standards for how we want to support our workloads," DeHaan said. "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."

Moving to cloud-ready, portable platforms

A surprise hypervisor renewal bill accelerated the modernization timeline. Mississippi migrated to OpenShift with Portworx as its hypervisor hosting platform, a move that delivered an 1,800% increase in storage capacity without disruption while shrinking the server footprint. The architecture creates portability between on-premises data centers and cloud environments.

"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."

Government IT teams balancing modernization with security requirements often seek training that addresses both infrastructure and policy concerns. AI for Government Courses cover the guardrail and platform strategies that public-sector organizations are adopting, while AI for IT & Development focuses on the infrastructure-side tools DeHaan's team is using to onboard engineers and manage large-scale workloads.

Why this matters for government professionals

Mississippi's approach shows that cloud modernization and AI adoption do not require sacrificing security or control. The 1,800% storage increase achieved on a smaller server footprint demonstrates that re-platforming can cut costs while expanding capacity. For agency leaders, the takeaway is clear: standardizing infrastructure workflows through policy guardrails lets newer staff execute complex tasks safely, turning AI from a theoretical risk into a practical tool for service delivery.