Office of the Chief Information Officer

United States Department of Agriculture

Managed Hosting

Service Description

NITC will manage customer-provided servers up through the Operating System (OS) in a secure operating environment including systems installation, engineering, administration, and support.

What's Included

  • NITC enterprise class Facility
  • Availability and utilization monitoring
  • Customer notification of related incidents
  • Physical equipment installation assistance
  • Cabling services per Enterprise Data Center standards
  • Optional customer asset disposal
  • Full Operating Systems administration services
    - Limited systems engineering
    - OS installation and customization
    - OS upgrades and patching
    - Security hardening per NIST standards
    - Application software installation assistance
    - User management and audit log review
    - Virus protection and vulnerability mitigation
    - Disaster recovery support
    - Incident and problem resolution
  • Optional SAN / NAS services
  • Backup / Archive services with customizable retention
  • Network services
    - Local and Wide Area Networking
    - Network Security Services
  • Related inheritable management controls
  • Optional Professional Services such as:
    - Planning and Integration
    - Application Integration
    - Database Management
    - Project Management

  Supported Operating Systems

  Service Platform
Operating System x86 Sparc pSeries
VMWare™ x    
Windows™ x    
Redhat™ x    
Solaris™ x x  
AIX™     x

How We Charge

Hosting charges are based on the number of physical and virtual servers managed.

Price Drivers:

Service Level Metrics

Measure Target SLA
System Monitoring 24 x 7
Incident Response 24 x 7
System Availability Varies by customer environment

* NOTE: NITC utilizes the USDA Universal Telecommunication Network (UTN) for Wide Area Network services. The UTN is contractually guaranteed to be 99.9% available but has historically delivered 99.997% availability.

Cost Saving Tips

  • Utilize NITC Network Services
  • Utilize NITC SAN / NAS and Backup/Archive services
  • Utilize server virtualization to reduce hosting costs

Additional Information

  • Customers are required to adhere to NITC Enterprise Data Center power, racking and cabling standards.
  • Customers are required to adhere to NITC Network vulnerability mitigation policy
  • Customers must allow NITC to maintain/update the Operating System to ensure vendor supportability

Download the Managed Hosting page from the NITC Service Catalog.