On April 15, 2020, WaTech Director and state CIO James Weaver signed a Statement of Work (SOW) with Illinois-based Ensono to begin the transition to mainframe as a service (MFaaS).
The project will involve migrating workloads (applications, databases and interfaces) from Olympia to a mainframe owned and managed by Ensono in its data center. This will include work by Ensono to fully understand the current environment, operate in its present form, and eventually transition the workloads to their data center.
During the next phase of the project, Ensono will perform discovery and knowledge transfer with WaTech staff on the current mainframe environment with the first deliverable a high-level transition plan.
WaTech and Ensono expect to accomplish this transition over the following timeline:
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April-June 2020: The Ensono transition team will shadow WaTech's mainframe staff to understand and document their duties, with the objective of transitioning those responsibilities to Ensono staff.
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July-September 2020: The Ensono team will begin remote infrastructure management of the WaTech mainframe environment.
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October 2020 and beyond: Ensono's Operations team will manage WaTech's mainframe. Ensono will lead the definition of a transition plan for WaTech customer workload to the Ensono data center.
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After the workload transition is complete, Ensono will be fully responsible for the hosted mainframe environment and provide support beyond first-level agency engagement by the WaTech Support Center.
"Engaging with WaTech in this initiative to deliver mission-critical mainframe platform as a service will ensure optimal efficiency and stability," said Richard Dresden, Ensono Senior Vice President, Field Operations. "Through this partnership, we'll work together to execute on a plan that will best serve WaTech, Washington state agencies, and its citizens."
"We look forward to a long, healthy relationship with Ensono," said Weaver. "This is a company that has a proven track record--they know mainframe, and they know the public sector. I am confident that this will be a smooth transition that will enable our partner agencies to continue delivering critical services to their customers."