Providing Expertise to Keep Critical Systems Operational

Background

IRS business systems that collect and process taxes, detect fraudulent activity, and provide customer service to millions of users, rely on an underlying infrastructure to provide an environment to execute these functions. The IRS infrastructure also provides business applications with services to transmit, protect, process, and store data, along with services to integrate those business applications with one another. This is why the IRS uses all means available to keep the infrastructure up and running 24×7, 365 days a year.

Challenge

The IRS infrastructure is comprised of numerous COTS and custom subsystems. These systems require routine inspection, monitoring, tuning, patching and other operation and maintenance activities. The IRS takes on these enormous challenges using an organization of dedicated and skilled civil servants with years of experience keeping systems up and running. Even with the IRS’s strong support staff, gaps in required expertise affect their ability to deliver a reliable environment.

Services
- .01Infrastructure
- .02Staff Augmentation

The Solution

Companies like STP who build systems are often called upon to provide continuous expertise to help maintain those systems. As is the case with the IRS infrastructure, STP was asked by Northrop Grumman to provide experts to the IRS Enterprise Operations organization to help operate and maintain their messaging, security, directory and data infrastructure. STP’s 10 industry professionals, working alongside IRS personnel, provided over 40,000 hours of expertise to keep the agency’s critical services always up and running.