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Office of International Affairs Leans on the TCG for a Little TLC

Technology Consulting Group (TCG) provides OIA with comprehensive support for new web hosting solution.
Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Prior to June 2016, Zach Chandler and his IT team in the Office of International Affairs (OIA) were using private hosting companies to house some of their department’s most important websites.

When Zach, Technical Strategist for OIA, contacted UIT’s Technology Consulting Group (TCG), he was looking for support in migrating these sites to a Stanford-supported server. He needed a cloud-based solution that was cost-effective, would help him easily integrate with on-campus infrastructure, and most importantly, ensure compliance with Stanford’s minimum information security standards, known as MinSec.

TCG stepped in to advise Zach on a workable solution and help administer the entire process, as part of their Comprehensive Support offering. The team offers several tiers of support as part of its role in providing expertise as technology consultants, advisors, and administrators to the Stanford community.


Noah Abrahamson, Director of TCG.

“We want to provide our clients with the best possible experience,” said Noah Abrahamson, Director of TCG. “Our Comprehensive Support agreement covers so many aspects of deployment that in Zach’s case, we started to sound like a broken record each time we told him ‘we take care of that for you, it’s included in your agreement.’”

The solution that TCG chose for the OIA was Amazon Web Services because it is flexible, cost competitive, and fast to deploy. The TCG team provided SUNet-based access to OIA’s chosen vendors for web development, and addressed all the details needed for a smooth workflow.

“TCG and their services are amazing,” Zach said as he reflected on the partnership. “The team is expert, timely, and have a great service orientation. One of my continual challenges is meeting MinSec standards for moderate risk data, and TCG has made it so much easier for me to meet them.”

Real-time support and collaboration

Throughout the duration of the migration project, which took place throughout the summer, the teams collaborated efficiently and in real time, using a modern messaging tool.

The tool allowed team members from TCG and OIA to share ideas both in real time and asynchronously, searching with their mobile devices to catch up on past discussions. Developers and engineers posted code snippets, swapped files, and configured monitoring alerts to post in shared channels.

“This project is a shining example of how effective these types of tools can be,” Zach said. “It helped us navigate some tricky back-and-forth technical matters involved in the process.”

Learn more

To learn more about the Technology Consulting Group and its services, visit the Technology Consulting page on the UIT website.

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