Government Agency
Designing and implementing an application development solution to drastically increase security, reliability and accuracy for a large state department.
Client:
The judicial branch for one of the largest states in America.
Challenge:
The client needed to maintain and update its criminal records. This data is highly confidential and needed to conform to law enforcement security standards. Moreover, the data flows and integrates through many external sub-systems such as Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) or Employment Development Department (EDD), so the Criminal History Update Client (CHUC) application is expected to work with a variety of different legacy subsystems with utmost security, reliability and accuracy.
The client’s existing solution was unable to meet all of these requirements. It was a 20-year-old solution written with fat-client architecture using Visual Basic. The primary users of the application were data entry employees who numbered over 500 at one site alone. This meant that a small update on the application required eight hours of downtime to update across all the systems.
Solution:
Yash Solutions was tapped to execute the application development. Since both technology and business knowledge were equally critical to planning a re-design with updated technology, Yash assembled a team that included a business analyst with domain level knowledge and senior software engineers.
Yash Solutions broke down the development work in three phases:
Phase 1 – Requirement Gathering and Project-plan Building
Yash strove to understand detailed requirements and build a project plan that would meet the Client’s budget and schedule. Over several weeks, Yash analyzed the existing solution and tracked issues that the old solution was unable to mitigate.
Phase 2 – Design,Development and UAT
During this phase, Yash developed a prototype for Client verification and sign off to ensure solution requirements were met. The approved design would overcome the limitations of the old solution.
Phase 3- Delivery & Support
In the final phase, the new application was deployed in production with limited user traffic and gradually increased so that Yash could monitor and make adjustments. Yash continued support for 30 days following launch.
The Result:
Yash solution exceeded all the Client’s expectations and provided the following improvements:
Fast and efficient application maintenance: With the new client-server architecture, the Client’s user computers connect directly to serversand not to terminals making application maintenance fast and efficient. The architecture also allowed for more hardware on the server and to easily handle loadbalancing on server nodes.
Easier access and higher security: Back-office work became much easier with single-point log entry and fullaudit-trail logs. Since the server was secured through network securities with VPN accessibility, users can access the application remotely without compromising
security or compliance standards.
Interoperability between sub-applications: Implementing service-oriented architecture with all data modeling using open XML standards gave the Client tremendous interoperability between sub-applications. With XML, a J2EE application running on an IBM Websphere container from SUN, OS seamlessly integrates witha .NET application. This was a major plus for the Client. Customization and minimal user training: From a user standpoint, the solution’s design templates looked similar to what they currently using, thus minimizing training. It
also provided an array of user customization options.
Role-based security: Using an open-source Spring ACEGI security module, the application can control the level of method invocation, meaning, users can’t invoke a method if not authorized. It also implemented a full role-based security model, giving administrators control over what module a user can perform based on roles.