Validating the Identity of Passport Applicants for U.S. Department of State

SOSi has managed a critical U.S. government decision support system used by domestic passport and visa officials at over 250 consular posts around the globe for nearly two decades. The system validates the identity and eligibility of applicants before document issuance via a comprehensive “namecheck” database.

Recently, the program team was challenged to securely migrate the sensitive mission application from a government mainframe to the client services environment while maintaining uninterrupted service to end-users. Throughout the transfer process, our team continued providing 24x7x365 operational support for all applications for visa and passport issuance.

Today, SOSi operates and maintains the distributed systems applications supporting the decision support system’s architecture. We also continuously monitor the platform and perform root-cause analysis to keep the system operating at more than 60 servers at dispersed locations globally. Our team fully tests all system fixes and upgrades before deploying them system-wide to ensure operational integrity and maintain optimal performance.

Our program team developed a solution to successfully transfer all data from an OS/390 mainframe system to an x86 Windows system, generating notable savings, enhanced performance, and improved scalability.

The system we operate and maintain is a central repository that is critical to national security. With our support, we have enhanced collaboration between major government stakeholders (e.g., visa and passport offices) and important, high-visibility external stakeholders, including federal law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Due to SOSi’s commitment, technical talents, and outstanding engineering team, the system has maintained a 99.9999% uptime for the past ten years.