With aging systems and the need to modernize, DLIR and Cisco delivered an upgraded system that will power their small team to success for years to come.
The State of Hawaii DLIR promotes industry and labor, enforces labor laws, and secures worker rights and benefits for over 1.4M residents. This includes processing unemployment claims.
Bennett Yap is the chief information officer at the State of Hawaii’s Department of Industrial Relations. As a 29-year employee of the State of Hawaii, Bennett is a dedicated public servant who works to preserve Hawaii’s Employee and Labor services. He and his small yet mighty IT team operate as the technological backbone, ensuring seamless service delivery to the state's citizens.
“I remember a time when people were reluctant to send an email. We relied on telephones, fax machines, and the USPS to get the job done. Now, people start calling IT if the internet goes down for 30 seconds or a message fails to load. Over the past 29 years, we have gone from having no internet to moving many of our systems to the cloud. And in the government space, that is nothing short of incredible.
I started working for the IT office of Hawaii’s Department of Labor and Industrial Relations in 1994. We’re responsible for the IT infrastructure that stores people’s work history and medical reports and processes their unemployment claims. Our impact extends beyond the department itself. Our stakeholders include private companies and other state departments and agencies, including the governor’s office, all of which rely on the services of the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations.”
Bennett Yap, CIO of the State of Hawaii’s Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, shares his Cisco experience.
“Despite the long name, we’re a small office. We don’t have the resources internally to implement and deploy the new technology required to keep things running smoothly. Instead, we rely on vendors and resellers to augment our team when it’s time to upgrade our systems or add solutions to our toolkit.
We had been chugging along for years with our IBM mainframe. Our systems were somewhat out of date given our mandate and budget, but even though storage was tight, things were mostly fine until the pandemic lockdowns. Previously, we processed a couple of thousand unemployment insurance claims a week. During the pandemic, demand exploded, and we found ourselves handling 200,000 claims weekly.”
A mainframe may work today, but it’s not scalable for high-volume workloads.
“The mainframe was not scalable for that kind of volume. We didn’t have the CPU power to process 100 times more claims. However, we shared the mainframe with other state offices and services, and they sacrificed their workloads so we could run ours. The crisis revealed the deficiencies of our infrastructure, and we eventually moved to an off-premises mainframe on the mainland that offered more scalability. It was a short-term fix, and we realized even that wouldn’t be enough for the future.”
“We had already upgraded our network infrastructure when the pandemic hit, but we lacked the CPU and storage to take advantage of its increased bandwidth and speed. It wasn’t only the mainframe at fault. The department’s dedicated back-end servers were nearing end-of-life, and we couldn’t move everything to the cloud because we handle a lot of sensitive data that must remain on the premises.
To update our storage and compute, streamline infrastructure management, and secure our IT assets, we chose a trio of Cisco solutions: Cisco Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), and Cisco Catalyst Center network management and automation. This combination of products resulted in an end-to-end solution with full visibility that we can easily monitor and manage.
We chose Cisco Hyperconverged Infrastructure because it was easy to set up, use, and maintain. We were already using IBM VersaStack storage based on Cisco UCI converged infrastructure, and replacing it with Hyperconverged Infrastructure allowed us to add software-defined CPUs to our software-defined drives, increasing the flexibility and scalability of our infrastructure. Because we were moving from older to newer Cisco technology, it was an easy migration. Still, we have limited resources, so Cisco provided extra assistance to augment our small internal team. They fully supported us during the deployment.
We store IRS data on our servers, and recent legislative changes require us to take additional steps to secure our data. We went with Cisco ISE to add a strong level of port security that supports those legislative requirements and ensure that we pass our IRS audits. ISE integrates seamlessly with Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Catalyst Center, providing robust endpoint, access, and permission management without overburdening our IT team.
Once again, we worked directly with the Cisco team for the ISE deployment. It was another testament to our ongoing partnership that Cisco stepped in to help rather than leave us on our own.”
“The combination of Cisco Hyperconverged Infrastructure, ISE, and Catalyst Center simplifies the overall management of our infrastructure, and we can see this most clearly when it comes to our file storage and recovery.
We didn’t have space to keep everything before, and frequently asked users to delete files they weren’t using to free up our limited storage space. Now, we can provision new storage as needed with Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Catalyst Center. Some users have developed a habit of cleaning up old, unused files, and will occasionally remove something important by mistake. Our new infrastructure makes it easy to recover deleted files, too. Cisco’s robust backup, archiving, and recovery tools give us the confidence that we can always access what we need.
One of our previous bottlenecks was storing medical images for disability compensation claims. We scan and archive a lot of medical records and reports. Thanks to Hyperconverged Infrastructure, we no longer purge them to make space, and our faster CPUs, storage, and network mean we can share and view high-resolution images without straining our resources.
We also use Hyperconverged Infrastructure to keep mission-critical applications in-house. One of our divisions recently wanted to build an on-premises database because they didn’t want to move a sensitive API to the cloud. Before HCI, we would have urged them to use the cloud and our team would have had to figure out how to secure their API. But now, we can host the database on our servers without worrying about capacity issues, and we have the added security of ISE to keep confidential information confidential.
Recently, legislators from the State of Hawaii asked us to build an application to manage a government and private sector internship program resulting from a newly passed bill. While government agencies and private companies will hire these interns, the Department of Labor will pay them and manage their hours. It’s no small group—we’re talking 3000 college kids over the next four years. Thanks to Hyperconverged Infrastructure, we can build and scale the application without bringing in an external consultant or needing a quote for new equipment.”
“Our new technology has freed my IT team from many of our previous burdens. Catalyst Center’s one-click upgrades and plentiful automations save us around 100 hours (about 4 days) a year. Instead of managing our network and keeping track of licenses, we can work on what I call ‘back burner IT,’ the stuff we were forced to set aside, like enhancing our security posture, updating our IT policies, and improving governance.
And let’s not forget about the budget. My team handles everything from spinning up servers to securing our network. But we have a limited budget and can’t afford to hire specialists to cover all areas of our environment, nor can we stay updated on new technology trends as they emerge. Working with Cisco to deploy Hyperconverged Infrastructure, ISE, and Catalyst Center proved that we don’t need to hire specialists. Instead, we can rely on Cisco to complement our expertise. We know where to turn when we need expert advice and solutions to solve our current IT problems and take us to the next level.”
The right infrastructure allows a small team to be more efficient and effective, accomplishing more than they thought possible
“Cisco technology has proved its value repeatedly, and having Cisco on our side removes some of our previous limitations. We’re still small, but our infrastructure makes us much more efficient and effective, allowing us to do more than we thought we could.”
