The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Mission Statement fulfills President Lincoln’s promise “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s veterans. One of the VA’s specific missions is Veterans Health Care, and the VA’s Veterans Health Administration is the largest integrated health care network in the United States, with 1,255 health care facilities serving 9 million enrolled Veterans each year. TekSynap, through its partners, supports the VA’s mission by providing a wide variety of Information Technology (IT) Enterprise support services and has successfully deployed network technologies across over 310 million square feet of medical facilities, comprising 5,775 medical facilities. These efforts include the design, configuration, and installation of 3,800 wireless LAN controllers and 308,207 Wireless Access Points, all while touching over 32,000 network switches on 16,368 floors across 8313 buildings.
TekSynap supports the VA and other customers through our deep and strategic relation AT&T Federal. As a strategic service delivery partner, our team supports the VA Office of Information and Technology (OIT) through the following IT Enterprise Support Services:
Wireless Enterprise Services – VA refers to this program as the Wi-Fi NextGen program during which existing wireless equipment – Wireless LAN Controllers (WLC) and APs are refreshed with newer more capable models, enhancing existing wireless coverage to meet new VA design standards and wireless coverage is being extended into areas that currently do not have coverage to both VAMC campus and remote sites. The goal of the NextGen program is to enhance the existing wireless location-based infrastructure across the VA to keep pace with the mobile nature of future applications (healthcare arena) including Juniper products, allow for VA’s growth requirements, meet VA security requirements and FIPS 140-2 certification requirements. In addition, the enhanced deployment of 5GHz will allow for high throughput data devices (e.g., VA Laptops), VA Apple devices, Voice applications (e.g., Nurse Call), Video applications (e.g., TeleHealth, multicast streams, point to point video conference), and set the framework for future applications such as Veterans Guest Internet Access.
Wireless Guest Managed Services – TekSynap architected a guest Wi-Fi solution to address the VA’s need for a homogenous enterprise wireless solution across VA facilities. The Guest Wireless solution is built on performance and security by utilizing products from market leaders and providing flexibility by leveraging the existing VA’s enterprise wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure while creating a DMZ specifically built for Guest Access use and employing the benefits of the cloud. The solution ensures proper security controls are in place for the complete lifecycle of each guest and provides real-time controls to protect the internal infrastructure from degradation and interference. To anchor the enterprise deployment, TekSynap stood-up the NOC to manage and address the specific needs of each facility where the solution is deployed. This approach enhances the security posture with key inspection points, guest access controls and content management where necessary or appropriate. As part of the Guest solution, TekSynap also provides 8×5 (Monday-Friday) Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, for VA guest wireless users. Each site has a designated toll-free number for Guest users to utilize for any needs or issues they may have.
Local Area Network (LAN) Infrastructure Readiness Program (IRP) – The LAN IRP program will refresh over 17,000 LAN switches across 8 Veterans Integrated Services Networks (VISNs) covering various CONUS and OCONUS regions. Through this program, TekSynap provides the VA with the network equipment as well as all engineering & installation services required to fully implement the purpose built and approved VA LAN IRP network architecture. This includes teams that provide on-site installation, configuration, and engineering services across 63 VAMCs and over 300 remote clinics. Throughout the refresh, TekSynap is responsible for migrating from existing Cisco switches to a Juniper based network infrastructure leveraging custom-built API tools to integrate with the Juniper MIST portal. Our engineers enable advanced micro-segmentation and zero-trust capabilities via VX LAN topologies for each VA Medical Center (VAMC) and associated Community-Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOC), a significant technical achievement considering the size and scale of the VA’s networks.
VA Network Engineering, Design, Implementation, and Infrastructure Support (NEDIIS) – TekSynap, as a subcontractor to GovCIO, provides comprehensive support for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Network, Engineering, Design, Implementation, and Infrastructure Support (NEDIIS) program. The five-year, single-award task order encompasses technical support for VA’s Trusted Internet Connection Gateways, Virtual Private Networks, Next Generation WAN, Network Operations Center, Business Partner Extranet, and six VA Corporate Data centers. TekSynap’s team augments the VA’s Wide Area Network (WAN) engineering team, offering Tier 4 WAN Engineering support, as well as assistance at VA Labs in Cleveland, OH, and Albany, NY, and onsite engineering at the DC headquarters. The team is responsible for maintaining transport and connectivity between all VA locations via an MPLS cloud running on AT&T and Lumen ISP networks. Additionally, TekSynap provides subject matter expertise in troubleshooting the WAN architecture and routing protocols (mBGP), engineering expansion and greenfield deployments, and assisting the agency in migrating to a native IPv6 network, all while supporting the VA’s move of IT and telecommunication services into the Cloud.
