Commonwealth of Virginia (Virginia Information Technologies Agency)

Project: Enterprise Application Development Platforms

The Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) is the Commonwealth's consolidated information technology organization with responsibility for governance of IT investments and the security, technology procurement, and operations of IT infrastructure. The Agency Outreach group of the Enterprise Applications Division (EAD) at VITA provides software development and integration support and services to small agencies, the secretariat, and projects that require cross-agency collaboration.

In the spring of 2009 this group received a request from the Secretary of the Commonwealth to build and host an online solution for Notary and eNotary applications. At the same time it also received a request from Virginia’s Workforce One Stop councils to create and host a low cost solution for a common intake form for the centers. Given the limited resources available, under the constraints of traditional technologies, these custom development projects would have been cost prohibitive.

To meet this challenge, EAD leveraged cloud computing to quickly provision a virtualized software development platform. Using Amazon EC2 services, the group was able to add and remove development or testing environments with ease. Even after full release to a production environment, EAD uses cloud computing to scale the production environment up as needed and for disaster recovery backups through RackSpace virtual storage services.

Virginia used cloud computing to develop new applications that would have otherwise been cost prohibitive. Instead of going through a process that typically lasts months, EAD was able to stand up a virtualized development platform from the cloud in less than two hours. VITA is still evaluating cloud computing at the agency level, reflecting on this group’s recent success delivering service with the speed and flexibility its customers need.