Over Labor Day weekend, a dedicated FCC team worked day and night to complete major IT upgrades. This work included physically moving more than 200 different legacy servers out of FCC's headquarters to a commercial service provider.
Why the move? Over the last several years, the FCC has faced ever-increasing costs to maintain its legacy IT systems. This move to a commercial service provider will help reduce the costs to maintain the systems, improve their resiliency, and allow us to shift many of our legacy applications to the cloud – as we did with our Consumer Help Desk.
With a massive server move of this scale – even with detailed planning, independent verification, and backup plans – the opportunity always exists for surprises, especially with legacy IT systems, nearly 400 program applications, and hundreds of servers.
Our servers left FCC headquarters in seven moving vans after midnight and arrived safely at the new commercial data center facility early Friday morning.
While all the data and infrastructure arrived intact, upon arrival we discovered the need for some additional cabling to be done by our commercial partners that took longer than expected. Unfortunately, this delayed completion of all of the system upgrades – even with the FCC team working around the clock throughout the holiday weekend.
The good news is ECFS is available to the public and EDOCS should be available later today. More detail on the systems we are working to make available by Thursday morning can be found here.
We will continue to work diligently and provide updates on these IT upgrades. The entire FCC team and I truly appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to complete all of the upgrades.