DoD Azure Success Story: One Year, 100% Uptime

January 13, 2021
This past Thanksgiving marked the first anniversary of going live with a SharePoint environment that AIS migrated from on-prem to Microsoft Azure IL5. Since then, our client has experienced 100% uptime during business hours and reduced deployment timelines, from weeks to minutes.

Challenge: Improve Performance, Speed Up Deployments

AIS set out to help a DoD agency that had experienced ongoing service issues with their existing provider while operating their on-prem SharePoint farm. During the year before the migration, the DoD customer experienced three service outages during business hours, which halted the ability to perform mission-critical activities. Additionally, their existing enterprise service provider required a lead-in time of 1-2 weeks to deploy any code changes or new capabilities into the environment. AIS was tasked with building a cloud solution to maximize uptime and accommodate rapid deployments to better serve the fast tempo required by our DoD customer.

Solution: Hybrid IaaS/Paas in Azure IL5

To provide a solution tailored to maximize uptime and accommodate rapid deployments, AIS architected a DoD first: a hybrid IaaS/PaaS environment in Azure Government IL5 that utilized the DISA Cloud Access Point to integrate with NIPRNet. We leveraged a suite of technologies to employ DevSecOps methodologies, allowing the solution to remain scalable while adhering to industry best practices. By implementing an automated code scanning solution, we reduced deployment lead-in time from weeks to minutes. Our infrastructure as code (IaC) development also drastically reduced the time required to build a new environment from several days to under one hour.

Looking Ahead: Cost-Sharing, Scale Across the DoD

AIS has worked with our DoD customers to offer these cloud services to neighboring agencies to benefit from cost-sharing. In doing so, we have passed on lessons learned and processes that we have developed to share our success across the DoD enterprise. As we grow, we continue to integrate evolving best practices to remain at the DoD DevSecOps initiative’s forefront.

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AIS Achieves Connection of DoD DISA Cloud Access Point at IL5

September 14, 2018
AIS Gets Connection of DoD DISA Cloud Access Point at Impact Level 5

Getting the DoD to the Cloud

Our team was able to complete the near-impossible. We connected to the DoD DISA Cloud Access Point at Impact Level 5, meaning our customer can now connect and store any unclassified data they want on their Azure subscription.

About the Project

The project started in July 2017 to connect an Azure SharePoint deployment to the DoD NIPRnet at Impact Level 5. Throughout the process, the governance and rules of engagement were a moving target, presenting challenges at every turn.

Thanks to the tenacity and diligence of the team, we were able to successfully achieve connection to the Cloud Access Point (CAP) on September 6th, 2018. This was a multi-region, with 2 connections, SharePoint IaaS always-on deployment, which involved completing all required documentation for the DISA Connection (SNAP) process.

We are now moving towards the first Azure SharePoint Impact Level 5 production workload in the DoD, so be sure to stay tuned for more updates.

A Repeatable Process for Government Cloud Adoption

Azure Government was the first hyperscale commercial cloud service to be awarded an Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency, and this was the first public cloud connection on Azure in the DoD 4th Estate.

With fully scripted, repeatable cloud deployment, including Cloud Access Point connection requirements, we can now get Government Agencies to the cloud faster, and more securely than ever before.

We work with fully integrated SecDevOps processes and can leverage Microsoft’s Azure Security Team for assistance in identifying applicable security controls, inherited, shared and customer required controls.

See how you can make the cloud work for you. Contact AIS today to start the conversation, or learn more about our enterprise cloud solutions.

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Improve Your Geospatial Data Production Workflow in the Cloud

March 2, 2018
ICON & GOLD Teaming Up To Explore Earth’s Interface to SpaceFor years, Federal agencies have struggled to drive efficiencies while addressing the growing volume and increasing size of geospatial data. Legacy stove-pipe connectivity and desktop thick-clients have prevented traditional production environments from achieving the potential of a modern cloud-based architecture. Coupled with responsive web-based components, the cloud offers a seamless framework to automate tasks such as data ingestion, pre-processing and product generation. AIS is proud to be helping our users migrate into these next-generation production environments.

Our Federal team is currently involved with multiple projects that foster the adoption of cloud-based tasking, ingestion, processing and visualization using open-source web technologies. We foster an approach to migrating data processing algorithms from research groups across the Intelligence Community into production environments such as AWS Commercial Cloud Services (C2S).

For instance, the open-sourced NGA Scale framework allows users to customize heavy data processing schedules and tasks, while leveraging and managing a large number of cluster nodes used to process each job.

Right…. So what does that mean, exactly? Read More…

More Federal Agencies Head to the Cloud With Azure Government

February 23, 2018
About this time last month, Microsoft announced that its Azure Government cloud platform received Authority to Operate (ATO) designations from both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Air Force gave Azure Government the Defense Department‘s Impact Level 4 ATO, while ICE issued a FedRAMP High ATO.

In other words, that DoD Impact Level 4 ATO confirms that Azure Government complies with security standards required to host “controlled unclassified data for development, test and production environments within CCE.” The Air Force has already started to build a cloud infrastructure through the ATO and a shared application platform and hosting environment.

The FedRAMP High ATO authorizes Azure Government to handle ICE’s most sensitive unclassified data, including data that supports the agency’s core functions and protects against loss of life. The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and the High ATO designation for Azure will allow them to innovate even faster.

This is great news for both the agencies and for Azure Government. We’ve helped large federal agencies make the move to the cloud using Azure tools, and while these migrations are always quite complex, we’ve actually streamlined the process down to five crucial steps: Compliance, envisioning, onboarding, deployment, and sustainment. 

AIS’ five-step DoD Cloud Adoption Framework is built on lessons we’ve learned from countless successful commercial and DoD secure cloud migrations and results in an expedited yet fully compliant process. We’re looking forward to helping many more agencies head to the cloud as a trusted Microsoft (and government) partner.

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The SIs They Are a-Changin’

December 8, 2017
I thought Per Werngren made some important observations in his recent article for Redmond Channel Partner Magazine. His main point: System Integrators (SIs) need to evolve their business models or risk disintermediation. As workloads are migrated to AWS and Azure, automation replaces the need for people to perform those tasks. This automation enables governance and compliance to standards, while also setting the stage for better downstream, fully-automated management, monitoring and operations. This, of course, further reduces the need for people performing in those roles,

Meanwhile, the new generation of intelligent PaaS services for predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. are also replacing jobs once done by hand. These new tools allow us to build better and more intelligent applications.

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Despite all this potential for automation, we still regularly see organizations allowing contractors to move workloads manually. It’s simply in a staffing contractor’s best interest to have people do this, despite it being a time-consuming and error-prone process. But why would an SI recommend automation and reduce their long-term revenue? Read More…

The Pentagon Wants to Head to the Cloud. AIS Can Lead the Way.

November 10, 2017
In an article on Defense One this week, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan put out a call on behalf of the Pentagon:

We want you — to get us into the cloud much faster.

We need the private sector’s help to vault DOD into the world of elastic computing and machine learning.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but AIS can definitely do that. In fact, we already have! And we have an entire cloud adoption framework and strategy specifically designed for the Department of Defense.

Navigating DoD organizations through complex cloud migrations is never an “easy” task, but the AIS DoD Cloud Adoption Framework is built on a solid foundation of compliance, best practices and lessons learned from countless successful commercial and DoD secure cloud migrations.

A few other benefits, while we’re bragging here:

  • Don’t Stop at Lift and Shift: AIS can take your existing lift and shift cloud efforts and transform them into PaaS and SaaS options for advantageous use of new Cloud technologies.
  • AIS Cloud DoD-ready Blueprints: Ensure your compliance with DoD STIGS and L2, L4 and L5 baselines from the start.
  • AIS Templated DoD Business Cases: Ensure you meet all the requirements for DoD’s internal governance processes and quickly gain ATO approval to move to the cloud
  • AIS Automation Capabilities: Reduce your costs and speed your migration of
    your systems into the cloud
  • Sustainment Operations: AIS manages your Cloud investment, leveraging new
    Cloud services increase efficiencies. Your continued success is our passion!

From the Defense One article:

This rapid adoption of cloud infrastructure and platform services is not the end, but a beginning: laying a foundation that can revolutionize how DOD deploys information technology services, develops advanced capabilities, and unleashes the power of agile computational resources and advanced data analytics.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Let’s get started.