Obama Foundation: a segmented overlay tested before go-live

Context

The Obama Foundation engaged LGL Networks for operations at the Obama Presidential Center Library — a high-profile institutional environment where the network had to be invisible and flawless. Registration, staff operations, and live production all needed to run behind the venue’s own infrastructure, with no compromise to access control or to the experience.

We operated as a segmented Critical Operations Network overlay, behind the venue circuit — supplementing venue infrastructure where permitted and never bypassing venue exclusivity. Further engagement specifics are held to what the client has authorized us to publish.

Challenge

An institutional opening of this profile concentrates risk:

• Public scrutiny and zero tolerance for failure. A visible network problem at a Presidential Center event is not a recoverable inconvenience — it is a reputational event.
• Multiple operations on one environment. Registration, staff operations, and production each had distinct reliability and access requirements, but were converging on shared infrastructure.
• No single accountable owner by default. Without one operator standing behind the network, responsibility would have been split across venue, production, and registration vendors.
• Proof required before go-live. “It should work” is not acceptable at this level — resilience had to be demonstrated, not assumed.

Approach

We applied the standard LGL motion — Risk Assessment, written venue authorization, Critical Operations Overlay, monitored through teardown.

Segmented overlay behind venue infrastructure

We deployed a segmented production and operations overlay behind the venue infrastructure, with registration and staff zones isolated from production traffic. Our documented segmentation standard kept registration, staff/operations, production, and management traffic in distinct zones, wired-first for the paths that could not tolerate contention.

Connectivity resilience

We engineered defined failover for the critical paths within the venue’s permitted configuration, with documented target windows. LGL procures dedicated, redundant connectivity for the paths it operates rather than reselling commodity bandwidth.

Pre-opening acceptance + failover drills

Before go-live, we completed pre-opening acceptance and failover drills — verifying that segmentation held, that failover landed as designed, that critical-system redundancy was live, and that monitoring was reporting. Resilience was rehearsed, not hoped for.

Onsite engineering + NOC monitoring

An onsite network lead owned incident response, backed by remote NOC monitoring through teardown — one accountable operator throughout.

Outcome

How we ran this engagement:

The post-event report documented acceptance-test results, drill outcomes, and segmentation integrity. Additional measured detail is held to what the client has authorized us to publish.

• Pre-opening acceptance and failover drills: completed before go-live