IT optimization through cloud migration

The Leidos team's work with the Office of Child Support Services (OCSS) is an ongoing IT optimization largely through cloud migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

OCSS operates several federal systems and mission critical databases to assist Child Support Agencies and other stakeholders including federal and private partners. The Division of Federal Systems (DFS) within OCSS maintains OCSS’s federal systems. OCSS recognizes that the emergence of new technologies provides opportunities for economic and operational improvements and puts a great emphasis on continuous improvements to the federal systems. As part of the continuous improvements, OCSS laid out an IT Roadmap to modernize their legacy systems operating on a mainframe platform to a modern cloud infrastructure.

Leidos is actively helping move OCSS data and the applications to the cloud to save cost and improve the functionality of the OCSS IT environment. 

The Leidos AWS Approach

The OCSS’s environment in AWS is rigorously controlled by Leidos to ensure each application’s functionality. A management Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network oversees a production VPC. With security and operational tools in place, the management VPC ensures that the resources in the production VPC contain no security vulnerabilities and remain functionality for OCSS. Interactions between these accounts and the wider Internet are facilitated through a third VPC, the transit VPC. This third network ensure that the correct traffic is going to the correct destination in the most efficient networking method possible. All AWS infrastructure in both accounts are copied into two Availability Zones which are separate facilities in a geographical area. Furthermore, all applications in all three VPCs are held in private subnets with no direct ingress or egress points from the wider Internet.

Customer Benefits

The Leidos architecture in the cloud provides several important benefits to the OCSS customer.

• The multi-Availability Zone set up for all applications and data in AWS ensures that if one data center experiences outages or malfunctions, the applications will remain available from the other zone they simultaneously reside in.
• The applications in private subnets are not easily accessible from the wider Internet; traffic must go through an Application Load Balancer and several firewalls, minimizing the chances of network-based cybersecurity attacks.
• The Transit VPC helps reduce network latency and ensure the most efficient networking routes possible for OCSS users that access the cloud-based applications.

For more information on Leidos' AWS cloud solutions, please visit leidos.com/cloud or contact us at [email protected].