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A Contractor’s AWS GovCloud Migration Success Story

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A federal contractor specializing in data analytics software for the DoD faced challenges with its existing hosting infrastructure, which comprised multiple on-premise data center environments. In response to a government mandate for cloud migration, the federal contractor evaluated various cloud environments. After careful consideration, they concluded that migrating to AWS GovCloud was the optimal solution. To further streamline their operations, they sought an MSP to oversee their new Cloud environment, allowing them to concentrate on managing their customers and applications. Cleared Systems, a trusted and experienced partner, was subsequently engaged to support the federal contractor in orchestrating a seamless migration to AWS GovCloud. It was also supposed to ensure that the cloud environment aligns with the contractor’s specific objectives and the stringent security demands of the DoD.

Objectives

  • To migrate the federal contractor’s data analytics applications to AWS GovCloud, ensuring a secure and compliant cloud environment for sensitive workloads.
  • To help reduce the federal contractor’s hosting and operational costs while improving their application performance and availability.
  • To provide the federal contractor with ongoing cloud management and support services to streamline their operations.
  • To ensure the migration is compliant with the federal contractor’s stringent security and regulatory standards of the DoD.
  • To complete the federal contractor’s migration to AWS GovCloud within a tight deadline with minimal disruption to their operations and customers.

Challenges

  • The Federal Contractor had to meet the required application uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA). The potential failure to meet high availability requirements posed a critical concern. It could undermine mission preparedness, potentially weakening the military’s advantage on the battlefield. Thus, ensuring a high availability of the Oracle databases was paramount. 
  • Time wasn’t on our side as the Government mandate required that the migration be completed within a tight deadline and with minimal disruption to the federal contractor’s operations and customers.
  • The migration had to be compliant with DoD’s strict security and regulatory standards, such as FedRAMP High and DoD SRG IL4/IL5. 

Solutions

  • Cleared Systems Used AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to migrate the Oracle databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle, which provides high availability, scalability, security, and performance for relational databases in the cloud.
  • Our migration provided the federal contractor with AWS GovCloud at multiple Impact Levels, aligning with the required security standards and ensuring a secure cloud environment.
  • We deployed AWS CloudFormation to help federal contractor’s engineers automate the provisioning and configuration of AWS resources in a repeatable and consistent manner, which reduces human errors and saves time and costs.
  • Our migration team used AWS CloudEndure Migration to migrate the applications from the on-premise servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in AWS GovCloud, which provides secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
  • To ensure that the Federal contractor can monitor and audit the AWS activities and resources, our team deployed AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config. This was critical for compliance and security purposes.
  • We deployed the AWS Systems Manager that would help the federal contractor manage and automate tasks like patching, inventory, backup, and recovery across the hybrid cloud environment.
  • We continued offering ongoing cloud support and maintenance with our managed services using different solutions. With our robust Managed Services, the Federal Contractor gained greater visibility over the cloud to identify potential vulnerabilities and remediate security threats. Those Managed Services capabilities included:
    • 24/7 Network Operations Center support
    • Using the AWS Security Center
    • Traffic management and monitoring for vulnerabilities and anomalies in the Federal Contractor’s orchestration.
    • Using the AWS Managed Services (AMS) for change management, incident management, security management, and cost optimization.

Cleared Systems’ Managed Services team continues undertaking proactive measures to ensure the security and health of the Federal contractor’s AWS GovCloud environment.

Results

By successfully migrating the data analytics applications to AWS GovCloud, Cleared Systems helped the Federal contractor achieve several benefits, including:

  • Reduced hosting and operational costs by up to 60% by eliminating the need for maintaining on-premise data centers and leveraging the pay-as-you-go pricing model of AWS.
  • Improved availability and performance of their applications by using highly scalable, reliable, and secure AWS services that can handle peak demand and recover from failures quickly.
  • Enhanced security and compliance of their cloud environment by using AWS GovCloud, which meets the stringent requirements of FedRAMP High and DoD SRG IL4/IL5, and by implementing best practices for encryption, identity management, access control, logging, and auditing.
  • Accelerated time-to-market and innovation by using AWS CloudFormation, AWS DMS, AWS SCT, and AWS CloudEndure Migration to automate and simplify the migration process, which was completed within three months with minimal disruption.
  • Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty by delivering faster, more reliable, and more secure data analytics solutions that support mission-critical operations for the DoD.

 

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