Leidos assists a U.S. Military Branch move to the AWS Cloud
The Leidos Team worked with a U.S. Military customer to migrate their applications from multiple on-premise data center environments to a multi-cloud environment, successfully migrating more than two dozen applications to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud environment. The customer has leveraged many benefits from the cloud, reducing the cost of application hosting and operation and increasing the security of its applications and data.
Customer Challenges
The customer experienced high operations and hosting costs for its applications in the on-premise data centers and was also under a government mandate to move applications to the cloud. The combination of high costs and leadership pressure drove the customer to reach out for a solution to dramatically lower cost, improve performance, and meet the increasing pressure to move to the cloud.
Leidos Cloud Migration
Leidos was the prime for the design, build, operation, accreditation, and security of the customer’s cloud environments and the migration of the customer’s legacy mission applications to the cloud platform. The platform received accreditations at IL4, IL5, and IL6 in AWS and provides a set of common services to mission application owners, enabling more autonomy and control over their applications than in the previous on-premise environments and reducing operational and hosting costs significantly. The environment follows AWS’ architecture best practices. During Leidos’ time as the prime, more than two dozen applications were migrated into the AWS environment.
The Leidos AWS Approach
The Leidos-led team analyzed, re-factored, and migrated mission-critical applications that deliver personnel, financial, and logistics services to the customer. Specifically, Leidos’ cloud solution offers AWS GovCloud at Impact Level (IL) 2, 4, 5, and 6. The Leidos solution contains the first-ever cloud-native access point to access IL4/IL5. Mission application owners inherit many controls from the cloud environment’s Authorization to Operate (ATO), as well as the Cyber Security Services Provider (CSSP) offering from the hosting environment, streamlining their ability to obtain application-specific ATOs in their dedicated AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). As part of refactoring to consume the cloud-native services from the CSPs, the migration teams re-architected and re-factored apps to be SAML enabled, horizontally scalable with Elastic Beanstalk, and integrated with AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), Redshift, Lambda, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), and a host of IL4 and IL5 AWS services where applicable. Applications utilize CloudTrail for security monitoring. The migrated applications provide greater performance and security at a lower cost.
Customer Benefits
Leidos’ cloud solution keeps the customer’s data and systems secure and operational costs low while giving the mission application owners the flexibility to add new cloud services to their individual cloud accounts. It is important to design migrations and cloud applications with security in mind from the beginning to give the customer confidence in the solution – particularly for a military customer; security is key. Furthermore, the scalability provided by the cloud services such as Elastic Beanstalk and Lambda brings significant cost and performance improvements over the more rigid on-premise hardware. Overall, the customer benefits from the security of their solution as well as scalability and cost reduction.
For more information on Leidos’ AWS cloud solutions, please visit leidos.com/cloud or contact us at [email protected].
