Counter Intelligence Works with 8(a)-Certified Ciracom on IT Architecture Project

Objectives, Scope, Requirements. Ciracom has an 8-year history of providing network operating system administration, messaging and directory management thought leadership to Counter Intelligence; they have provided planning, engineering, transition, deployment and system administration for their network operating system/directory management enterprise migration. Their experience-based recommendations for architecture, service provisioning and deployment have been accepted by the client and have helped determine the enterprise messaging capabilities and best practices on the Counter Intelligence network.

Operational Constraints. Migrating the Counter Intelligence enterprise presented a number of operational constraints identified during the network assessment. These included:

• Active Directory modification of the current forest construct while maintaining backwards compatibility with applications
• Move from physical servers and databases to data centers using the USMC virtualized hosting platform.
• Co-existence for users in the environment
• "Zero Outage" mandate from senior Counter Intelligence leadership
• "Mission critical" - enterprise systems to support critical staff, suppliers and customers -- the system can never go down.

Technical Characteristics of the Products, Solution, And Services Developed or Provided. In support of Counter Intelligence, Ciracom designs, maintains, and monitors the Hosted Microsoft Exchange messaging system, VoIP, secured LAN/WAN infrastructure and desktop support for locations in the mid-Atlantic region as well as the Northeast corridor. Ciracom is responsible for monitoring and optimizing network topology, database design, and remote access for approximately

150 staff over 2 geographically disparate locations on approximately 10 servers.

Ciracom uses its extensive experience to fully maintain and operate the Counter Intelligence Active Directory (AD) including the AD server's operating system, the AD application, DNS service, Group Policy Objects (GPO), Sites and Services, and replication supporting approximately 150 user accounts over 2 geographically disparate locations on 4 domain controllers and 2 Active Directory domains. The team maintains the patch level of the AD domain controllers. The DNS service that runs on the AD servers serves not only for user Internet address lookup, but is also critical for clients to determine the most efficient access to resources within Counter Intelligence - the implementation of Microsoft Active Directory and GPO configurations enable configurations to be pushed to select clients, both small and large subsets, to ensure settings are applied to include standard server, desktop, email, application access and VoIP configurations.

Enterprise -- Ciracom plays a key support role for enterprise service management through the design, installation, operation, maintenance, and optimization for Counter Intelligence. Ciracom engineers designed and implemented the architecture and migration strategy that facilitated the transition to Windows 2008, Active Directory, and Hosted Microsoft Exchange; and ultimately to VoIP.

Due to the criticality, Counter Intelligence's networks are designed and implemented to provide high availability and assurance of service. Leverages the redundancy of the network transport as well as Disaster Recovery site implementations, server clustering, backups, and off site replication as tools to ensure availability. Quality of service and system performance measures such as Service Level

Agreement monitoring have been implemented using Microsoft best practices as well as leveraging enterprise and custom tools to monitor and enhance service delivery through preemptive maintenance and planning. These enterprise and custom tools are designed to provide data collection from hardware performance points like CPU cycles, physical disk errors, and physical memory utilization to Exchange Application specific monitoring points like message queue size, connectivity, and server health. The system architecture was designed to enable Counter Intelligence to scale both horizontally and vertically to meet current and future capacity needs.

Legacy Environments. Ciracom has been the provider for Managed Cloud Services over the past 7 years. They have proven successful in helping Counter Intelligence meet and maintain its mission to provide fabricated and ready to install counter tops within 24 hours. Over the course of time, Ciracom has successfully implemented a number of major system upgrades to include:

• Networking - Ciracom migrated Counter Intelligence into a regional hub and spoke architecture and deployed point to points as the primary transport protocol. They implemented IP-based routing and QoS services that now serve as the underlying delivery mechanism for real-time video, voice, and VoIP.
• Directory Services - Ciracom designed, planned and executed a plan to migrate Counter Intelligence to Windows Active Directory services. Due to the Ciracom's design, all Counter Intelligence personnel were able to access a single address book that contained information for all staff, created distribution lists for critical suppliers and secured the Active Directory forest through proven Microsoft best practices.
Data Migration and Cutover (including number of mailboxes, if applicable). Ciracom was responsible for a number of significant migrations, including:
• Directory Services - Ciracom Engineers designed and implemented the architecture and migration strategy that facilitated the transition to Windows 2008, Active Directory and Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010. The current architecture provides more efficient and effective means for implementing new solutions, such as Share Point Online and Windows Azure. Ciracom provides support for maintenance and promulgation of the Global Users Directory and synchronization of enterprise servers.
• Domain Structure - Ciracom designed and implemented the migration strategy to enable the transition of Counter Intelligence's domain controllers from Windows Server 2003 to 2008.
• Configuration Management - Ciracom personnel serve as key members of the Counter Intelligence IT working group, providing baseline implementation and execution plans; and supporting baseline change, configuration, and release management.

Implementation Challenges. Ciracom encountered the following challenges in performing migrations for the Counter Intelligence:

• User/Migration: Lack of current state documentation and quality control documentation. To overcome these issues, Ciracom engineers developed several processes and scripts to help automate the overall migration and ongoing support process with our tools including Kaseya and Autotask.

Service Support Challenges. For Counter Intelligence, it is difficult to determine with 100% accuracy all the systems, and the features of those systems, that rely on one another. Within 3 months after migration, our Tier II and Tier III service desk was still working with outside application developers and system owners to help them resolve issues with the functioning of their application.

Successes. Ciracom has maintained an excellent track record with Counter Intelligence. A brief list of successes includes:

• Multiple migration projects have been completed since 2007. Ciracom migrated Counter Intelligence to a combination of a hybrid, public and private cloud infrastructure which as drastically reduced the TCO, and provides a mean-time-to resolve of issues within 45 minutes.
• Ciracom installed Microsoft Enterprise Exchange services, providing the five locations to collaborate quicker and more inexpensively.

Ciracom has been responsible for the desktops, servers, firewalls, network routers, phones, mobile and application support for the past 8 years.