Leidos builds a new common operating picture for disaster and health emergency missions
A Leidos U.S. federal government customer needed a modernized system to improve business processes and provide new solutions for supply chain management and personnel tracking. In response, Leidos built and fielded—and now operates and optimizes—this system in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud environment. This new system benefits the customer by providing increased resiliency and availability of the system supporting their core business processes, as well as a cloud-based platform for the rapid development and integration of new solutions. Additionally, the Leidos solution has been awarded as a federal health technology program driving innovation and results across multiple key government agencies.
Customer challenges
The federal customer sought to integrate existing back-office information technology systems supporting their business processes to fuse and leverage in concert the disparate data sets these existing systems provided. They preferred a system that provided an open architecture framework over bespoke point-to-point integrations to support and enhance their existing information technology infrastructure. The customer also needed the architecture to be built for scale to enable an indefinite number of future expansions of system responsibility.
Leidos development
As a prime contractor, Leidos was tasked to design, build, secure, and operate the software system and cloud environment. Upon initial release, the solution enabled stakeholders to respond to formal requests for information by facilitating intra-agency engagement and public-facing information dissemination—especially pertinent at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, Leidos has continued our responsibilities as the prime contractor for the effort, driving extension of capabilities into a system that enhances coordination among agencies, improves supply chain resiliency by providing asset and resource visibility, streamlines the management of information and data, and offers a unified view of our customer’s readiness and response activities.
The Leidos-AWS approach
Leidos designed and built an AWS-native system that conforms to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. To provide an open architecture, the solution is built on the Leidos Enterprise Application Foundry (LEAF), which combines Leidos application development frameworks and open-source platforms into a cohesive toolkit for building and hosting enterprise-scale, mission-purpose software.
This horizontally scalable LEAF-based system leverages a wide array of AWS services, leaning heavily on the following fundamental services across multiple development, testing, pre-production, and production environments:
- Virtual Private Clouds
- Elastic Compute Cloud
- Elastic Load Balancers
- Elastic Kubernetes Service
- Managed Streaming Kafka
The system is deployed in an Impact Level 5-equivalent environment that was secured and accordingly given an Authorization to Operate by the federal customer. To meet the stringent requirements for this accreditation, Leidos leverages many of the security services provided by AWS:
- GuardDuty
- Inspector
- CloudWatch and CloudTrail
- Security Hub
- Config
- Secrets Manager
Additionally, these environments are further hardened by operating in a private AWS cloud behind a trusted internet connection, enabled by an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection.
Customer benefits
With the solution developed by Leidos, our federal customer can now:
- Maintain a common operating picture before, during, and after disaster preparedness and response missions
- Sustain real-time situational awareness of personnel and resource readiness throughout their supply chain.
- Coordinate communications within and beyond the agency—to include those with the public—through a single system.
This solution brings these benefits while maintaining high security and low operational costs. As is standard, the Leidos solution prioritized security and privacy from the outset. The new system marks a significant upgrade from traditional on-premise, hardware-based systems, thanks to its superior scalability and performance.
Ultimately, customers enjoy a trifecta of benefits: robust security, increased flexibility, and cost savings.
