Case Study: State of Washington achieves secure, compliant citizen‑data protection and faster analytics with Microsoft Power BI

How Azure Government helped the Exchange build a highly secure and compliant environment to protect citizens’ data

The State of Washington’s Washington Health Benefits Exchange faced aging, out-of-compliance datacenter equipment that couldn’t meet strict security and compliance needs for highly sensitive citizen data. To modernize legacy systems and protect constituent information, the Exchange turned to Microsoft Power BI (leveraging Azure Government and Power BI Embedded for analytics and hosting) to move to a secure, cloud-native environment.

The Exchange rebuilt its backend on Azure Government with a zero‑trust design, worked with Deloitte and Microsoft to migrate in 16 months, and modernized its data warehouse and reporting using Microsoft Power BI and Power BI Embedded. The result: some data processing and backups run up to 75% faster, an annual cost avoidance of $650,000, a FedRAMP High–compliant platform that supports ~1 million residents (200–250k enrollments during open enrollment), and a model other state agencies now reference.

State of Washington

Benjamin LaBelle

Associate Director of Infrastructure Services