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Enterprise Technology Office

By Water Resources Mission Area

The USGS Water Resources Mission Area Enterprise Technology Office provides information management and technology capabilities to facilitate data gathering, analysis and modeling, scientific collaboration, research, knowledge management, and work processes. 

The Enterprise Technology Office (ETO) is one of two offices within the Water Resources Mission Area’s Office of the Chief Operating Officer. The Office supports the National Water Information System (NWIS) and other water enterprise information technology systems. 

 
The operations, programs, and activities of ETO are performed by three branches: 
  • The Cybersecurity Branch maintains the Water Resources Mission Area Security System Authorization to Operate (ATO) by ensuring Mission Area and Water Science Center subsystems are compliant with security requirements and do not pose an unacceptable level of cybersecurity risk. The Cybersecurity Branch monitors and tracks cybersecurity status for each Mission Area and Science Center subsystem, coordinating with those subsystems to complete operational cybersecurity and compliance activities, liaising between the systems and the USGS Office of the Associate Chief Information Officer, providing support and guidance on implementation of cybersecurity and privacy controls, briefing the Water Resources Mission Area System Owner, and meeting with subsystem security managers quarterly.  
  • The Engineering Branch provides architectural and software development services as well as information technology architecture standards to support development and sustainment of long-term products. The Engineering Branch provides, evaluates, and shares resources to foster adoption of software best practices and standards in development and sustainment efforts across the Water Resources Mission Area software and Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) development teams; coordinates between project development efforts and product sponsors to ensure priorities are balanced and properly sized to handle timely product releases; provides support analysis, development, and product maintenance for continued operation throughout the long-term product life cycle; and supports project software engineering, system ideation, and application architecture. 
  • The Infrastructure and Services Branch provides a suite of infrastructure, services, operations, and end user and lab support options for various needs within Water Resources Mission Area. The primary responsibility is to manage an array of offerings that efficiently and effectively support the Mission Area’s needs. The Infrastructure and Services Branch is comprised of three teams: Enterprise Infrastructure (EI), Enterprise Services (ES), and End User and Lab Support (EULS). EI establishes and operates computing environments in the cloud and on-premise data centers. ES provides operations, application deployment, user inquiry, and training support. EULS provides support to Water Resources Mission Area staff in Colorado, California and for users that are fulltime remote as well as direct support for Water Resources Mission Area laboratory information technology infrastructure.  

 

The Enterprise Technology Office keeps USGS Water data and information systems running.

ETO provides much of the unseen “plumbing” that keeps many of USGS Water Resource Mission Area’s products up and available for our stakeholders. As you visit other OCOO sites, you may see links to some of the publicly accessible applications we help to support, like Water Data for the Nation.  

 

Keeping all this plumbing working properly requires some specialized skills:

Working under the Cybersecurity Branch Chief is a team of IT Cybersecurity Specialists and IT Specialist Subsystem Security Managers whose ranks are supplemented by contract cybersecurity reviewers. 

The Engineering Branch is made up of architects (enterprise, application, and database), developers, sustainment engineers, and scrum masters who work in development teams augmented with contract developers. These teams build and maintain the applications that ingest, process, model, curate, and share water data with internal and external stakeholders. That development work utilizes containerization for ease of deployment to the cloud or on-premise infrastructure and a comprehensive service mesh architecture to secure, connect, and monitor subsystem integrations. 

With its broad scope of operations, the Infrastructure and Services Branch’s groups employ a diverse collection of talents. 

  • Enterprise Infrastructure IT and Computer Specialists support deployments to virtual cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services and expect to expand to a multi-cloud environment in the near future. IT and Computer Specialists working on-premise primarily work in a Linux environment—physical and virtual deployments—but also provide some Windows support. 
  • Enterprise Services (ES) stakeholders count on their team of IT Specialists, Database Administrators, and Physical Scientists, supplemented by contractor personnel, to provide a wide range of application and user support services. ITIL processes such as event management are largely managed through ES staff who establish alerts and monitors on Water Enterprise applications.
  • The End User and Lab Support team consists of several IT Specialists and additional contract support personnel to provide Tier 2 hands-on IT customer service and lab support. 

 

Network rack at the USGS EROS data center.
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The Enterprise Technology Office provides much of the unseen “plumbing” that keeps USGS Water data and information systems running. Network rack at the USGS EROS data center.