Celebrating 20 Years of Business: Cloud Hosting and Web Support

Throughout its 20 years, QIP has performed a wide variety of roles for many clients across public and private sectors. Today, we’re highlighting one of our key teams: Cloud Applications.

Since 2012, QIP’s Cloud Applications team has managed application and data center operations for the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Institute of Education Sciences (IES). This isn’t your run-of-the-mill IT department. The Cloud Applications team directly services over 175 ED staff, 60 surveys/programs, and 500 contractors and researchers tasked with collecting, analyzing, reporting, and disseminating IES data, publications, tools, and applications. In doing so, our team manages and operates over 400 databases, 60 virtual AWS servers, and 20 public websites.

The Cloud Applications team monitors servers, applications, websites, and databases to ensure each are available for IES use. The team scans sites and servers constantly for potential security issues. QIP works directly with the IES and webmasters to help the environment grow and evolve. Each person on our team touches all aspects of the cloud server to ensure knowledge transfer and validate each person’s work. The team also has a thorough documentation and standardization process for application implementation. In 2012, the Cloud Hosting and Web Support team migrated IES’s physical server assets into a cloud-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment—the first project of its kind at ED.

More recently, the team upgraded the Windows Servers. The upgraded servers offer improved performance, stability, efficiency, and reduced downtime. The number of applications, many of which were very large, made this project particularly hard.

Clear communication and strong project management skills are critical as the team interacts and manages the updates with numerous development teams from across IES.