ITS Services

We partner with our customers and private sector companies to optimize the use of information technology resources for enhanced delivery of government services. ITS understands technology is the driving force behind your daily operations and we offer a full range of solutions designed to put technology to work for you.

HOSTING (STATE DATA CENTERS)

Mississippi’s State Data Centers deliver highly available compute and storage solutions to state government ​entities. The Primary Data Center (PDC) has over 12,000 square feet of raised floor area, failsafe features, environmental controls, and robust technology to support applications within a hardened, resilient, and secure environment. The Co-Processing Data Center (CPDC) provides a protected environment for state agencies seeking an alternate or secondary backup solution for applications running within the PDC. Together these two facilities provide state government with a robust, flexible, secure, and cost-effective hosting cloud environment to meet the technology needs of the state.

Cloud Computing Ecosystem
Technology landscapes have changed dramatically over the past decade shifting from a customer-owned, on-premise computing environment to a tiered architecture providing state government with options for supporting and running unique applications. This change has allowed for the redistribution of funds from a Capital Expense Model to an Operational Expense Model (OEM), eliminating the need for large scale purchases and maintenance of technology equipment. Additionally, the move to an OEM has improved business resiliency and the overall delivery of services through available cloud technologies. Adopting a “cloud-right” strategy consisting of cohesive platforms and services affords subscribers with an ecosystem suitable for selecting a cost-effective, secure, and resilient infrastructure that can seamlessly transition workloads from one environment to another. The Mississippi Cloud Ecosystem for state government consists of the following:

  • An enterprise on-premise, private cloud solution housed in the state’s PDC
  • Mirrored infrastructure housed in the state’s CPDC for tiered business resiliency options
  • Secure public cloud access for improved or additional business resiliency, backup, and recovery capabilities
  • Technical expertise in all supported infrastructure platforms
  • Management software allowing seamless transitions of workloads between tiers within the Ecosystem

Co-Location Solution
ITS offers co-location space with lockable racks for housing state-owned production equipment in the PDC. The space is environmentally controlled in the physically secure area. Additionally, lockable rack space is available at the CPDC for backup or secondary equipment. The CPDC is a secure, top-tier facility made available through a public/private partnership.

The PDC and CPDC are both protected by generators, uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs), lightning protection, environmental monitoring, and physical security. Both facilities are staffed 24x365 with qualified and experienced data center personnel. The co-location services include:

  • Lockable rack space at both State Data Centers in a standard APC (42U) server rack
  • Multiple AC power options with redundant failover connections
  • Network port speed options (100M/1G/10G – copper or fiber)
  • Subnets of IP addresses for customer use
  • Regularly scheduled security inspection and monitoring

Database Systems
ITS Database Administration (DBA) employs state-of-the-art database technologies to provide secure, accurate and timely access. DBA support provides technical assistance for database implementation and usage and supports most of today's common database management systems including DB2, Microsoft SQL, Informix, and Adabas. Applications requiring other platforms will be considered as well. The DBA services include:

  • Installation, management, and upgrades of software
  • Database administration tools
  • Packaged application database products
  • Backup and recovery procedures
  • Monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting

Business Resiliency
Every year state government becomes more dependent on digitized data and on the networks that allow data to be distributed across the state. It has become critical to recover quickly from all forms of disaster that could affect computer hardware, software, data, and networks. The sophistication and complexity of today's technologies have increased the complexity of the solutions for disaster recovery needs. ITS recognizes the need for a strong business resiliency plan should a significant disaster strike. By leveraging the services made available through the state’s Cloud Ecosystem or the attributes provided by the state’s PDC and CPDC facilities and network architectures, agencies now have a highly redundant and resilient geo-diverse solution that can be tailored to meet your business recovery needs. The business resiliency services are built on the following:

  • Two top-tier, geo-diverse, and physically secure data center environments
  • High speed, redundant, and resilient network connectivity between the State Data Centers for automatic failover and protection
  • Fully managed private cloud environment with mirrored infrastructure and stretched clustering for seamless compute and storage capabilities
  • Virtual compute and storage capacity to handle mission-critical UNIX and Windows applications including email services
  • Access to public cloud services for additional flexibility
  • Assistance with production environment optimization, selection of application recovery options, and business impact planning for private cloud customers
  • On demand and self-managed business resiliency testing, as required

Active Directory Services
ITS provides the Active Directory (AD) solution to agencies wanting to replace their current AD environment or for those without an environment. With this solution, the customer is delegated administrative control of an Organizational Unit (OU). OUs can provide hierarchy to a domain, ease its administration, and can resemble the organization’s structure in an agency’s container.

Certificate Authority Contract Services
AA Certificate Authority (CA) is a trusted third-party that issues Digital Certificates that will automatically be trusted by most web browsers. ITS facilitates and maintains a contract with a commercial CA to provide certificate services to state customers, where needed.

Project Management
​ITS provides project management support for those agencies needing to define requirements, analyze assets, determine direction, and evaluate alternatives for infrastructure implementation of mission critical systems. The project management services include: 

  • Hosted Solutions Design and Configuration - ITS can assist you in reviewing your agency’s current production and business resiliency environments and provide guidance in selecting the level of server hosting support that best meets your business objectives.

  • Capacity Planning and Upgrade Support - ITS can provide project support in analyzing and determining current system capacity or upgrade requirements utilizing existing tools, reporting capabilities, and trending analysis, and best practices to assist your agency in planning system upgrades and changes.​

​For more information about these, or any other services listed on our site, please Contact Us.