Ensuring Continuity of Service

Background

In 2019 the IRS collected over $3.5 trillion in taxes, processed 253 million returns and issued $452 billion in refunds. At the core of its operations are its IT systems that receive and process taxes, payout refunds, help taxpayers meet their responsibilities, and assist the IRS with enforcing the law. Without these IT systems, the IRS could not function.

Challenge

Knowing how important IT is, the IRS invested billions of dollars to modernize their capability. While the IRS made every effort to build a world class infrastructure to host and support its most critical systems, it made little investment in ensuring the foundation to its IT services was always available if a problem occurred at the location where it was executing. As more IRS applications were deployed on the modernized infrastructure, the cost of losing the enterprise due to a site failure became too great to accept. The IRS knew they needed a solution to an ever-growing problem.

Services
- .01Engineering
- .02Infrastructure

The Solution

Working through a Unisys contract, STP engineers, project managers and subject matter experts were tasked with devising a strategy, managing the plan, and implementing the solution to keep the infrastructure up and running, 24×7, 365 days a year. Taking advantage of the IRS’s existing investment in multiple data centers, STP’s experts deployed the upgraded infrastructure in a load balanced, multiple site, active-active configuration that uses real time data replication within and between sites. This approach provides users with a seamless experience while giving the IRS the assurance that operations will continue even if disaster strikes.