The Immigration & Naturalization Service (IND) is an implementing organization of the Ministry of Justice and Security. They review between 100,000 and 150,000 residence applications annually from people who want to live in the Netherlands or become Dutch citizens. In addition, IND handles naturalization requests from people who have lived in the Netherlands for so long that they feel they are Dutch and want to apply for a Dutch passport. With this work, the organization plays an important role in many people’s lives.
“IND is developing rapidly in the technical field. This is partly due to management’s awareness to fully utilize technical innovations,” Gert-Jan Dol begins his story. Gert-Jan Dol is Manager Team Technical Management at IND. With his team, he is responsible for IND’s ICT infrastructure. The team has grown considerably in the number of employees. The atmosphere is good, partly due to the stable base of experienced and motivated employees. Everyone is given space to develop based on talent and interest.
The team has been working under the agile methodology for several years. This change in working method gave immediate insight into the amount of downtime of very important systems caused by releases and maintenance work. There had to be a solution to this. At the same time, the hardware replacement of the OTA and production environment was scheduled for 2021. Both situations created the need to find an innovative solution that would help reduce downtime while bringing more flexibility and agility to the IT organization. IND’s search ended at VMware with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution with VMware Aria suite. With that, the collaboration with Fondo | PQR. began in 2021;
Flexibility and expertise
Paul Struik, IT project manager at the IND and working on Gert-Jan’s team explains the choice: “To meet the objectives of our IT organization, we focus on all possibilities to be as flexible as possible. Both on the management side and on the development side. IND went looking for a solution that provides this flexibility. Especially for very specific systems on our management side because of complicated links between the hypervisor layer and hardware. On the development side, our LOTA (Lab, Development, Test and Acceptance) environment is very important to IND. There are about 250 developers working in this environment who benefit from flexibility. VCF and the Aria suite provide this for both teams.”
The collaboration between the IND and Fondo | PQR began with the deployment of VMware consultants. Based on their knowledge and experience, they provided advice, created the designs and completed the implementation. They are still contributing. Paul and Gert-Jan are very pleased with their efforts. Paul says: “Each person has their own expertise and partly overlap so they complement each other. Their flexible attitude is very good, they are communicative and really help us.” Gert-Jan adds: “There is also a click with the team with the same passionate subject matter experts. That is important to do our work well. We work together on the infrastructure layer on which the entire IND depends. It is important that the team works well together, because we cannot afford to be out for a day.”
Great strides made
Hardware replacement was scheduled. “The complexity that was added is that our pre-production and production environments are now still managed by an external vendor,” Gert-Jan explains. “We are in the process of bringing this back in-house. The solution we were looking for also had to meet the desire to be able to manage the entire OTAP street ourselves. Its security is a big aspect and agility and continuity is key for us.”
VCF further standardizes the infrastructure of the new LOTA and production environment. IND can easily add data center capacity in the virtualization layer, easily upgrade and add hardware in smaller increments. Previously, this was done in big steps which also meant big steps financially for the organization. “Moreover, we are looking to the future,” stresses Gert-Jan. “It now saves us a lot of time when requesting a virtual server or adding an application, among other things. This gives the desired flexibility and thus speed. Next, we want to be able to automate things, implement micro-segmentation and set up Self-Service portals.”
As part of the Ministry of Justice and Security, the IND has high requirements regarding cloud integration. By choosing VCF, the IND is making great strides for the future. Currently, an on-premises environment is still preferred. With VCF, they are developing a Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) and are flexible in a future cloud integration with both private and public cloud capabilities.
Modernization and micro-segmentation
VCF’s bundling of VMware products, along with the Aria suite, adds great value to the IND. The strength of this bundling is the agility the IND gains in its IT organization. With its applications and systems, they are able to meet issues coming from the business faster.
They are working on a major infrastructure modernization effort. Paul lists some examples of future projects to get the most out of VMware solutions. “We want to simplify and automate lifecycle management work, for both the VMware layer and also the virtual layer above it. This can easily be done with additional VMware products such as Saltstack. We also now have possibilities for far-reaching automation of standard infrastructure management work as well as automatic deployment of virtual machines and applications. And with the implementation of a container environment with VMware Tanzu, we are much more flexible in building and maintaining applications.”
Looking to the future, Gert-Jan is enthusiastic: “Using the products from the Aria suite also gives us more insight into our own infrastructure and application landscape. We can ensure an even more secure environment by applying micro-segmentation, for example, so that we are even more resistant to future threats. But one step at a time. We are aware that rolling out microsegmentation across this environment is going to take longer.”.
Learn more about IND? Take a look on Our organization | IND