IT Cloud Computing and Application Migration
The Federal Cloud Computing Strategy imposed a mandate on government agencies to implement a cloud strategy to reduce cost, acquire highly reliable, innovative cloud services in an efficient and timely manner. However, due to the lack of progress and ability to achieve the desired cost efficiencies, the pressure on government agencies to migrate to the public cloud has intensely increased. The DCOI memorandum aggressively states “that all Agencies shall, by the end of fiscal year 2018, reduce government wide annual costs attributable to physical data centers by at least 25 percent”. Achieving this goal will require developing practical and implementable cloud solutions.
There is no question that Cloud solutions are the most cost effective, reliable and secure means of providing IT infrastructure services. Unfortunately, as many government agencies are learning the hard way, contracting for and meeting the objective for Cloud services and solutions can be challenging. If it were as easy as contracting to a commercial cloud provider or implementing commercial cloud solutions, the government agencies would have done it by now.
So why is the government struggling where the commercial sector is excelling? – Because commercial cloud solutions cannot be implemented the same way within government spaces due to security, financial and contracting constraints. Contracting for commercial cloud services and solutions within government spaces, and successful execution of contract to meet performance objectives, both require:
- Establishment of clear boundaries and process roles among all ITSM elements of the organization, i.e. what the cloud provider is doing versus your agencies’ infrastructure, security and application developer staff
- Knowledge and integration of FISMA & NIST security guidelines and ICD 503 Risk Management Framework requirements
- Compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations, such as compliance with anti-deficiency laws
- Adherence to Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) mandates, the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and Portfolio Management integration.
This is where Mystek Systems stands out above the rest! Mystek Systems specializes in Federal government utilization of commercial cloud services and hybrid solutions. Mystek also specializes in Amazon Web Services, AWS GovCloud and Intelligence Community ITE C2S environment. We understand the environment, will navigate the federal landscape and deploy solutions in the fastest, most cost effective manner.
Specific to the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense, agencies must adopt strategies to ensure appropriate alignment to the DNI’s IC Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE) Strategy focus areas of a common desk top environment (DTE), joint cloud environment/commercial cloud (C2S) and government cloud (IC Cloud), an applications mall (AML), identity access and authorization (IAA) management, network requirements/engineering services (NRES) and security coordination services (SCC). These focus areas are designed to deliver on the Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) mandate to generate greater IT efficiencies across the intelligence community, improve IC mission effectiveness, and improve the security posture of the IC computing environment.
Mystek Systems led IC with the deployment of the AWS/C2S Cloud capability, which was recognized by the DNI as the “Flagship” Program. It became the model for the other Big 5 and Agile 12 IC agencies. Mystek Cloud Services provide support for a wide range of platforms, but specializes in Amazon Web Services solutions. AWS is bar none the best cloud provider in existence today and the defacto standard for the Federal Government both in classified and unclassified spaces.
MYSTEK CLOUD SERVICES INCLUDE
Cloud Architecting & Solutions Design
Mystek’s AWS Certified Solutions Architects (SA), with advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform, will help the government develop customized and optimized cloud solutions. Whether it’s designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS or selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements, Mystek will provide proven qualified expertise. And Mysteks AWS SAs will also ensure cost control strategies are optimized.
AWS Cloud Migration of Applications
Mysteks AWS certified staff can help with the immediate migration of complex, multi-tier applications onto AWS. We can do this directly, or we can provide Application Developers Cloud support to help them adjust to the cloud infrastructure and makes sure they design applications to take advantages of appropriate AWS services and maximize performance and minimize cost. The end result will be designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS.
Cloud-based Disaster Recovery, ITSCM and Continuity of Operations
Mystek Systems provides Cloud-based solutions for Disaster Recovery (DR) and Continuity of Operations (COOP). The use of virtualization and data snapshots makes the disaster recovery implementation in the cloud much less expensive and simpler than traditional disaster recovery solutions. The objective should be to completely automate the process of launching cloud resources which can bring up an entire cloud environment within minutes. When it comes to failing over to the cloud, recovering from system failure due to employee error is the same as recovering from an earthquake.
Lower Cost — Businesses are using the cloud to enable faster disaster recovery of their critical IT systems without incurring the infrastructure expense of a second physical site. Government organizations can scale their infrastructure on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis, while getting access to the same highly secure, reliable, and fast infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites.
Disaster Recovery Scenarios — Supports many popular disaster recovery (DR) architectures, e.g. backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site, environments that are ready to scale up at a moment’s notice and enable rapid fail-over.
Geographical Diversity – For example, With 33 data centers (Availability Zones) in 12 regions around the world, AWS provides a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services that enable rapid recovery of your IT infrastructure and data.
Flexibility – The government gets the flexibility to quickly change and optimize resources during a DR event, which can result in significant cost savings.
Durability — Amazon S3 provides a highly durable 99.999999999% (11- 9s) storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Further protection for data retention and archiving can be achieved through versioning in Amazon S3, AWS multi-factor authentication (AWS MFA), bucket policies, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Longer-term data storage where retrieval times of several hours are adequate, Amazon Glacier, which has the same durability model as Amazon S3, is a lower cost alternative. Amazon Glacier and Amazon S3 can be used in conjunction to produce a tiered backup solution.
Mystek Systems will provide (and if desired, prototype) solutions that will support the local failover of government critical systems located at its data center and, after migration to the cloud, failover of such systems located in the cloud environment. Mystek Systems provides ITIL-based IT Service Continuity experts with proven experience with COOP approaches, specialized AWS disaster recovery and Cybersecurity expertise to address NIST vulnerability management and continuous monitoring requirements.
Implementation of Cloud Service Provider Services, ITIL Service Catalog Integration
Mystek Systems brings innovative approaches that maximize the successful and rapid implementation of cloud solutions to meet government goals. Utilizing ITIL Service Management best practices, Mystek develops cloud migration solutions that meet budget and resource constraints and comply with federal mandates. We will provide a Cloud Implementation ‘Analysis of Alternatives’ based on the specific environment, budge, and long-term goals of the customer.
Implementation of Development, Test, and Production AWS Migration environments
Mystek Systems has successfully developed the Development, Test, and Production environments within federal spaces to support the government’s application development and testing needs. We were able to substantially reduce the cost of deploying cloud-based enterprise solutions, by applying innovative standardization and automation.
Using a tailored, systematic approach; Mystek engineers develop automated scripting packages to maintain configuration management, force standardization, and save money by reducing the labor force necessary to configure environments.