The Massachusetts Health and Human Services Virtual Gateway (VG) is a centrally managed platform for all online services used by the fifteen agencies within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS).  The VG provides over forty software applications used by eighty thousand users including state workers, health care providers, and the public. Healthcare providers may use VG applications to send claims to Mass Health or to submit disease information to the Department of Public Health.  Members of the public can request benefits from programs such as Nutritional Assistance or Transitional Assistance.

As the result of a competitive procurement process, Logicworks was selected to design, build, test, and manage a new private cloud IT infrastructure for the next major enhancement of the Virtual Gateway’s underlying data center. The private cloud solution was enhanced by Logicworks’ support model.  A team of named engineers was assigned consisting of specialists in IT architecture, security, database administration, storage, networking, compliance, Linux/Windows administration, and technical project management.  An assessment of the operational and technical requirements of the project resulted in a customized infrastructure with a complete managed services package.

Logicworks leveraged well established industry vendors to provide a computing environment based on state of the art servers, storage arrays, security hardware and software, and monitoring software. The infrastructure was built across two physical datacenters for geographic diversity to allow the VG to continue to operate in the event of a disruption to one of the datacenters. The resulting technical architecture allows EOHHS to deploy mission critical applications requiring disaster tolerance in an environment that will facilitate rapid, automated fail over, while retaining the flexibility to deploy less critical applications using a more cost effective conventional approach.

Once the infrastructure was operational, the Logicworks team shifted into an operational management role, providing 24x7x365 monitoring and engineering support.  Logicworks’ enterprise monitoring service scans all the components and applications comprising the new Virtual Gateway.  Logicworks has responsibility for system maintenance, security, disaster recovery, database clustering, as well as virtualization and storage management.

The result is a managed, secure, compliant, high-performance, cost effective architecture that exceeds the Commonwealth’s rigorous security and operational standards.  EOHHS depends on Logicworks for all system-level responsibilities freeing their staff to focus on application development and conversion, in an effort to more efficiently and effectively provide government services enabled by an innovative computing platform.