“When a hurricane or some other natural disaster hits a Department of Veterans Affairs facility, and the agency’s Office of Emergency Management responds, it needs to know its IT equipment will work.”
“That falls to VA’s Office of Information Technology, which is part of a growing trend of federal agencies that use managed services. This approach allows agencies to shed the costs of owning and updating the infrastructure needed to supply continuous services.”
“Right now, Lynette Sherrill, the Office of Information Technology’s executive director of Enterprise Command Operations, said her entire organization is almost entirely virtual due to the pandemic. In addition, although they are based in Austin, Texas, Sherrill said neither the SolarWinds cyber breach nor the recent winter storm, which knocked out most of the state’s power – including at her own home – was enough to stop central data center operations. That was a relief considering the enterprise service desk is one of the most complex service desks in the entire U.S. IT industry, running about 60,000 calls per week, she said.”
“’It is running about 3 million calls a year, and handling and touching more than 5.5 million tickets a year,’ she said on Federal Monthly Insights — Digital Modernization (Managed Services). ‘And we have about 575 agents on the phones throughout the week to respond to any it issues that VA may have. So scale and scope here is a big deal.’”
“When VA pushed out about 150,000 end users to their homes as the result of the pandemic, many of whom were first-time teleworkers, the service center took those calls, she said. Agents had to help with needs such as laptop set-ups and network connections remotely, and in the first eight weeks, call volumes doubled.”
“It is a feat she said only a managed service provider could have spanned as quickly as it did…” Read the full article here.
Source: From pandemic to SolarWinds and ice storms, managed services saving VA’s help desk from customer woes — By Amelia Brust, March 16, 2021. Federal News Network.
