Middleware Administration Support, Georgia Department of Labor
Overview
The Georgia Department of Labor matches qualified job seekers with employers and collects data to help businesses, economic developers, planners, and the workforce make quality work-related decisions. From offering the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which provides substantial tax benefit to employers who hire eligible workers, to administering the Unemployment Insurance system that supports the financial security of those temporarily out of work, DOL works to grow the economy and workers' positions within it.
Project Scope
The Department of Labor was looking to contract vendors to assist in design, build/deployment, and maintenance of the Georgia Department of Labor’s Middleware environment with normal maintenance routines, automation (Scripting) and DEVOPs tools expertise and to take responsibility for all aspects related directly to projects involving Middleware platform and infrastructure.
Solution
V Group as a prime vendor, under broad supervision, installed, configured, and supported a local area network, wide area network, internet system, computers, desktops and/or mobile devices. To accomplish this, we provided advanced administrator duties for IBM WebSphere Application Servers V8.5.5 and forthcoming V9.x and writing scripts to automate the manual tasks in a highly Virtualized Environment running on VMWare ESXi and then building/deploying/configuring and maintaining WebSphere, Tomcat and IIS environments. Having proficiency in Apache and IBM HTTP Server (IHS), we managed and monitored SSL, certificates, private/public key pairs and were up to date with latest cipher strengths as per Security Requirements.
To simplify the development work and make deployments more consistent and issues predictable., we designed and built automated code deployment systems. Leveraging open-source technologies such as Jenkins, ELK, TICK, Grafana and many more, we managed existing WordPress system, perform patching to meet all security compliances. V Group provided Linux support and developed/maintained Linux shell scripts along with implementation and maintenance of Linux security and authorization integration with Active Directory.
Additionally, we performed appropriate change management and incident management duties to comply with IT policies and procedures, provided recommendation on Spring Frameworks upgrades and did dump analysis with IBM tools. Apart from this, V Group consistently provided progress reports on a weekly basis, provided Level2/Level3 support, created process documentation for team and provide internal training to team members and worked with software/hardware vendors for problem resolution or planning.
Throughout the process, V Group maintained adherence to standards, processes, procedure, and audit compliance controls.