A leading state’s Office of Technology serves as a broker to state agencies, providing technology services and expertise to them as they provide critical services to over a million citizens.

Its goals include:

• Delivering modern government services
• Empowering government employees to through technology
• Delivering high returns on the state’s technology investments
• Fostering innovation and delivering continuous enhancement
• Enhancing the state’s cybersecurity posture

A major mainframe outage affects millions of citizens.

The state’s agencies were struggling to keep pace with constituent demands due to outdated legacy technology and a growing lack of mainframe skills due to retirement and attrition. The Office of Technology decided to outsource mainframe operations to overcome these challenges and to establish a foundation for modernization as it worked to reach its goals.

Before a vendor could be selected however, the state experienced a major mainframe failure that severely impacted its ability to serve the state’s constituents. The outage resulted in the inability of agencies to process citizen requests for services, collect the revenue necessary to support agency functions and, most concerningly, it jeopardized the delivery of benefits to the state’s most vulnerable populations.

One of the systems affected helps families obtain food, shelter, training, childcare assistance, educational resources, and assistance paying bills. Citizens could submit applications and renewals, but the requests could not be processed due to the mainframe outage. It also prevented agency staff from processing applications or making changes to existing cases.

Phase 1: Recover critical services

Despite no contract or commercial relationship being in place, Ensono offered to help the state get its mainframe back online. After a couple of days, the Office of Technology had managed to restore backups to a point, but still could not get its critical services back online. It issued an Emergency Procurement Request, which enabled it to take up our offer of help.

Ensono immediately stepped up, assembling a “war room” and working around the clock to identify and remedy the problem. We found that the mainframe was not able to access the data on a particular server. The problem was remedied within 48 hours and all services were restored to the state’s citizens and employees.

Phase 2: Mitigate the risks associated with the mainframe in question

The outage further evidenced that the state needed to rapidly mitigate the operational risks posed by its existing mainframe structure. Many of the hardware components and much of the software running on the existing mainframe were old and out of compliance and support.

The state submitted an Emergency Procurement Request so that Ensono could take over the operations of the existing mainframe immediately, to stabilize the environment and the applications, systems, and databases it supported. Within five weeks, a Mainframe-as-a-Service contract was in place, and we went live with Remote Infrastructure Management.

A while later, we migrated the state’s mainframe workloads to an Ensono owned and managed mainframe (Mainframe as a Service) located in our data center. Ensono took over full responsibility for running the mainframe on new hardware with an upgraded operating system and software. Ensono adheres to industry standard best practices for day-to-day operations, change management, and other elements of service and financial management.

• Vital citizen services were brought back online within 48 hours, showcasing the state’s commitment to its constituents and its focus on essential operations
• With Ensono managing the state’s hosted mainframe services, the state enjoys a reliable, flexible and scalable platform
• The state was able to mitigate its mainframe-related staffing shortage
• A cloud-like consumption pricing model enables the state’s agencies to continue to drive modernization and usher in the digital age for citizens
• The state now has fully functional disaster recovery capabilities

Now that the Office of Technology doesn’t need to worry about its mainframe, it can focus on state-wide priorities and initiatives.