The DII Network Engineering (NE) group’s primary responsibility is the design, service and management of the State of Vermont’s Wide Area Network (WAN), Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and Data Center network infrastructure. The group interacts with all State entities providing connectivity solutions for all site locations with an expected standard of 99.99% availability.

Network Engineering works in conjunction with State agencies and departments to design connectivity solutions to ensure business and system performance requirements are met. In many of today’s technologies the reliance on the network infrastructure and its configuration are paramount to the successful delivery of a system. Technology is commonly leveraged to produce efficiencies whereby multiple systems can be replaced by fewer if properly configured connectivity exists. DII: NE provides these connectivity solutions so that the State of Vermont can operate more efficiently on fewer system resources. NE often will collaborate with agency/department IT staff on Local Area Network (LAN) design to support these centralized systems.

DII: NE functions in a unique position as the mid-point to all State of Vermont network communication. This central vantage point allows NE to provision end to end service needs for large projects as well as be a valuable resource to departments needing network assistance or diagnosing LAN events. One such service is a “virtual” firewall service that is a unique offering for departments without the need to purchase additional hardware.

Network Engineering monitors and manages the daily operations and network health from a centralized operations center in Montpelier and works at levels II and III of the triage process within DII. Service and project requests are processed through a centralized work order system to efficiently route work requests to the appropriate team. The NE group also provides network/system monitoring and alerting services for departments and provides a custom department monitoring web portal. These centralized monitoring services have provided a great resource both internally to DII as well as to departments to quickly isolate problem points in hosts, network interfaces, and security events.