The Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) serves nearly 9 million residents and 650,000 businesses annually by providing a coordinated response to floods, storms, earthquakes and other disasters occurring within the state.
VDEM’s public-facing website is its No. 1 communications tool, serving as a key information portal that citizens and communities use during disasters.
Using the VITA contract, VDEM asked AISN to keep its state emergency site always up and disaster-ready.
Challenge
Building out and maintaining a two-server, on-premises datacenter that was fully disaster resilient and could accommodate more than 20,000 page views per hour on VDEM’s portal was simply cost prohibitive. The total cost of ownership (TCO) would have come to $220,000 per year. VDEM required a more cost-effective approach to fully compliant, high availability hosting and operations/maintenance support.
Solution
Not only did AISN deliver a custom, state-of-the-art hosted solution for the Drupal site, but AISN also delivered significant cost savings, enabling VDEM to reduce its TCO by more than 95 percent over 5 years.
AISN executed a fully compliant, geo-redundant solution that met all of VDEM’s key criteria and virtually eliminated downtime. The site’s production environment, which is located in an in-state datacenter, is replicated in real time to the recovery site, which is in a Tier IV datacenter located states away.
On an ongoing basis, AISN developers provided the agency with Drupal troubleshooting, including application level patching and break-fix support.
AISN’s team also provided compliance guidance and security assessment and remediation services, including failover testing, to ensure the site’s continuous availability.