State Benefit Management Program (USA)
Case study for the requirement of a CMDB in the support of a large State Benefit Management System.
Project Phase 1: On Premises Application
My company provides consulting services (software development, hardware, infrastructure and design) for a large benefit management system in the USA hosted in State datacenters. The sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and IRS (Internal Revenue Service) data contained in the system brings demanding regulatory requirements and a gap that was identified during a past audit was the lack of a functional CMDB to track infrastructure and access changes in the system. After a number of POCs, Tecnoteca was chosen as the vendor to supply software and services to fulfill the requirements of the CMDB, the CMDBuild READY2USE solution was selected due to the “ready to use” functional features as well as the overall value Tecnoteca affords.
The original configuration included connectors to vSphere and LDAP to provide infrastructure and user data to the CMDB. This was accomplished within a few days. Although most of the systems are virtualized, the physical systems were quickly loaded through input sheets and Tecnoteca Engineering staff quickly converted the XLS spreadsheets containing all the associated “relational” data (application, software, environment, hosted services) and a full relational CMDB was completed for the “application” within a very short timeline. With this data a report could be generated each night that reported changes in infrastructure or user accounts, based on whatever CIs were deemed requiring monitoring to fulfill the requirements of configuration management of the application.
Project Phase 2: Public Cloud Application
It was decided that a “transformation” of the application was required and the new architecture included the UI in Salesforce and the computational backend moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Tecnoteca reengineered the infrastructure connectors to now connect to the AWS API for EC2 and VPC data and enhanced the relational data to provide simpler access for generating needed reports like environment lists for calculating patching sets.
As the systems were migrated into AWS the previous CMDBuild READY2USE solution was used to control and track the decommissioning of systems remaining in the State datacenters. It was an invaluable tool to keep track of the migration process between the new servers migrated into AWS and the servers remaining in the old data centers.
Since AWS TAG data was used to define the systems in the EC2, all data was now automatically pulled through the AWS API. This included in part the environment, services, application and patching set. Now as systems are added, changed removed all relational data in the CMDB was automatically kept up to date and a change report was generated each night.
The rate at which the CMDB model progressed for both of the project’s phases was very impressive and we would like to thank Tecnoteca for their great product and engineering support.
Michael Porter
Operation Manager
Deloitte LLP