Middleware Hosting

Features

NCDIT’s Middleware Hosting team offers a suite of helpful services that support successful technology adoption. These include:

• Ensuring smooth operations by installing, configuring and administering all products in the middleware infrastructure solution 
• Providing customer support for both distributed and client server architectures
• Researching and testing each security patch release as part of base support and maintenance
• Responding proactively to enterprise monitoring threshold alerts and service interruptions 24/7
• Performing health checks, proactively renewing certifications as well as ensuring security compliance for all supported products, along with daily and weekly backups, connections and performance
• Providing disaster recovery testing and maintaining high-priority vendor support relationships
• Consulting, supporting and eliminating the complexity of supported middleware service migrations to new environments
• Customizing standard service level agreements to provide upgrades and patch schedules that support 99.9% availability of the client's middleware server

Benefits

• Standardize and simplify connectivity.
• Integrate existing infrastructure with new systems easily.
• Ensure the longevity of legacy investments.
• Support enterprise-level scaling.
• Lower integration costs associated with new technologies and updates.
• Reduce your organization's investment in infrastructure with an enterprise service bus and concentrate IT staff efforts on enhancing and delivering applications specific to your organization without the burden of maintaining the infrastructure.

Request Process

To request this service, or for more information, submit a ticket using the NCDIT Service Portal.

Authorization

• Service requests that incur a cost to the agency will typically require approval from the requesting agency’s CIO, financial officer or manager, depending upon your agency's requirements. 
• Any staff with access to the NCDIT Service Portal may engage the team for support or information.

Requirements & Customer Responsibility

Expected Delivery

Customers

Approved rates for this service are published in the NCDIT Rate Schedule.
 
View NCDIT Rate Schedule

The Middleware Hosting services team supports the following configurations:

• MQ Messaging Solutions
• Enterprise-Wide Application Integration Solutions
• Enterprise Content Management
• JavaEE Container

MQ Messaging Solutions

IBM Messaging Queue

• Send and receive message data with message queues. Information is exchanged between applications, systems, services and files, whether it consists of the same or different data types. 
• Guarantee message delivery by reliably moving secured messages in a queue, with zero loss of messages, and delivering later in case of service interruption or if an application is not ready to receive the data.
• Protect data at rest, in-flight and in-memory through fine-grained authentication and powerful data encryption with built-in high availability and disaster recovery.
• Move massive amounts of data between applications, systems and services at any time.
• Simplify the creation and maintenance of business applications.

IBM MQ Managed File Transfer (MFT)

• Customize and scale the automation of encryption, transmission, real-time monitoring and storing file types, including PDFs, email, EDI, XML and multimedia. 
• Enforce the organization’s security requirements and strict data security mandates for industries, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Basel II and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). 
• Support distributed and client server architectures and all managed file transfer issues. The Middleware Hosting team administers over 60 servers and 100 File Transfer Edition channels (FTE agents), which are queues through which the data is transferred, for the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services (N.C. Families Accessing Services through Technology), N.C. Department of Public Instruction, N.C. Officer of the State Controller and NCDIT.
• Technical advice, recommendations, installation and administration by the Middleware team cover four different options for IBM MQ MFT: 
  • IBM MQ Managed File Transfer Agent
  • IBM MQ Managed File Transfer Logger
  • IBM MQ Managed File Transfer Service
  • IBM MQ Managed File Transfer Tools
• Tasks performed by IBM MQ MFT include:
  • Create managed file transfers between systems in a managed and auditable way, regardless of the file size or operating systems used. MTF has the capability to transfer between distributed and mainframe systems.
  • Create new file transfers from IBM MQ Explorer on Linux or Windows platforms.
  • Create new file transfers from the command line on all supported platforms.
  • Integrate file transfer function into the Apache Ant tool.
  • Write applications that control IBM MQ Managed File Transfer by putting messages on agent command queues.
  • Schedule file transfers to take place later. You can also trigger scheduled file transfers based on a range of file system events, such as creation of a new file.
  • Monitor a resource (e.g., a directory) continually, and when the contents of that resource meet a predefined condition, start a task, such as a file transfer, Ant script or JCL job.
  • Use the RESTful API provided by the IBM MQ Managed File Transfer Web Gateway to transfer files.
  • Transfer both text and binary files. Text files are automatically converted between the code pages and end-of-line conventions of the source and destination systems.
  • Transfer files to and from IBM MQ queues.
  • Transfer files to and from FTP, FTPS and SFTP servers.
  • Secure transfers using the industry standards for secure socket layer-based connections.
  • View transfers in progress and log information about all the transfers in your network.
  • View the status of transfers in progress from IBM MQ Explorer on Linux and Windows platforms.
  • Use the RESTful API provided by the IBM MQ Managed File Transfer Web Gateway to see information about all transfers in your network.
  • Check the status of completed transfers by using the IBM MQ Explorer on Linux and Windows platforms.
  • Use the IBM MQ Managed File Transfer database logger feature to save log messages to a Db2 or Oracle database.

Enterprise-Wide Application Integration Solutions

IBM Integration Bus

• Enables business information to flow between disparate applications across multiple hardware and software platforms

IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository

• Provides functionality to store and retrieve service metadata
• Functions as a service registry for users in service-oriented architectures

Boomi

• Integrates applications in a shared cloud-hosted environment and is considered an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution
• Automates and simplifies the connection of applications, data, processes and services across multiple platforms (on-premises, private cloud and public cloud environments)
• Eliminates the requirement for provisioning, installing, managing and maintaining integration hardware, middleware and software for each agency when using NCDIT’s private cloud offering

More information about NCDIT's Boomi (Enterprise Service Bus) service.

Enterprise Content Management

Systemware Content Cloud

• Seamlessly connects content across your organization
• Automates the process of finding, extracting, transforming and delivering information in the context needed for analysis, reporting and communications

IBM FileNet

• A flexible, full-featured content management solution that enables creating innovative business applications on any cloud to govern all enterprise content
• Automatically extracts insights from unstructured content and dissolves content silos

IBM Content Navigator

• A web client console for users working with content from multiple content servers 
• Creates team spaces, and gives focused views of the content within relevant documents, folders and searches

JavaEE Container

IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS)

• This flexible, secure Java server runtime environment serves enterprise applications.
• Deploy and manage applications and services regardless of time, location or device type.
• Integrated management and administrative tools enhance security and control.
• Multi-cloud environments allow for choosing the deployment method.
• Continuous delivery capabilities and services help agencies respond at the speed desired for their business needs.
• IBM Application Navigator provides visibility to applications across traditional and container-based deployments.

IBM HTTP Server

• This web server based on an Apache HTTP server is used as a frontend for load balancing and as a reverse proxy for WAS servers.

Training & Help 

None

Other Related Links

None

Related NCDIT Services

• Database Hosting
• Enterprise Service Bus