• VSO’s innovative team has developed a mobile app to assist with project management, assessments and communication during a 18 month project with numerous simultaneous deployments.
• VSO expects to refresh roughly 20,000 Switches at 100 VA hospitals networks by the time the project comes to completion in 2022.

Project Summary

The US Dept of Veterans Affairs (VA) maintains hospitals and other health care facilities throughout the country that serve our nation's military veterans. In 2020, the VA selected Veteran Technology Partners (VTP), ThunderCat Technologies, and Virtual Service Operations (VSO) to refresh over 20,000 Cisco switches at more than 1,000 sites around the United States.

The VA identified the need to replace aging network infrastructure enterprise-wide across its hospitals, clinics, data centers, and veteran care facilities. This immense effort requires technical expertise as well as a high degree of logistical coordination to ensure refreshes are made within approved outage windows. Many sites provide critical medical services around the clock and loss of network connectivity could mean failure of medical equipment and vital resources, resulting in dire consequences for patients. Due to a strategic implementation timeline, VSO provides installation teams working concurrently at up to eight different sites nationwide to ensure enterprise infrastructure and configuration standardization which are essential to future VA technology initiatives. The sheer size of the effort, diversity of data center environments, and the critical work performed in medical facilities make this a strategic and highly visible initiative for VA

Process

The complexity of the VA LAN Switch Refresh posed challenges due the schedule, medical facility requirements, and sizable scope of the work. To meet these requirements, VSO utilized senior technical network and agile project management resources along with our ability to quickly train and certify teams from the military veteran and higher education communities while leveraging our remote workforce and training model.

VSO is a virtual company with a workforce dispersed across forty-seven states, furnishing VSO with the geographic reach of a much larger company. VSO sends out qualified surveyors to each VA site prior to the installation team’s arrival. Consequently, VSO’s installation teams know exactly what to expect at every site and can plan for any special circumstances. In addition, VSO has developed a successful training model prioritizing training current employees in new roles over hiring new ones. This employee-focused training model also allows VSO to train numerous junior and mid-level resources, jumpstarting their networking careers, and allowing VSO to make compelling bids for new networking business.

Project Outcome

The VA LAN Switch Refresh Project represents a sizable undertaking and years of planning to refresh and improve the enterprise network which supports our Military Veterans and their families. As the Disabled American Veteran’s 2021 Small Employer of the Year and a Department of Labor HIRE Vets Platinum recipient, VSO is proud to uphold our Veteran-focused mission as we work with the VA. The VA LAN Switch Refresh Project is the intersection between innovative technology and experienced certified resources who deliver excellence to their customers every day. Ultimately, VSO’s efforts will ensure seamless support for the VA’s technical backbone at over 1000 sites nationwide, and enable the continued quality medical care and benefits for our nation’s veterans.

Hash Tags

#Design, #User Focused, #Architecture, #Migrate, #Deployment, #networking, #federal, #coding