Situation: Our client, the Comptroller’s Office (COMP) of a DoD Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) Agency whose mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. The agency “explicitly reaches for transformational change instead of incremental advances.” The Comptroller provides expert financial control of Agency resources and fiscal activities. Emphasis is placed on internal controls over processes and procedures for accounting data supporting agency budgeting and CFO compliance. The Comptroller office understands the Cloud is increasingly where enterprises should be hosting a wide range of applications and platforms–given its cost, capabilities, security and flexibility. At the time, our client utilized three different operating system/server architectures for various reasons. They identified an architecture shift from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Linux would also be required. Our team completed the required analysis, identified the potential benefits of a migration to the cloud and decided to take a multi-phased approach to transition onsite server infrastructure to the cloud where possible. As a part of this approach, we helped our client migrate their web servers and database servers to the cloud. The cloud is well-suited for the types of financial management systems/applications/tools (data, analytic, reporting) identified as migration candidates by IT and the Comptroller’s Office.
Action: The Summit2Sea Consulting engagement team collaborated with the client to identify which solution was best, based on agency requirements and vendor offerings. AWS was selected as the cloud provider to provide a “Private” cloud. The agency anticipated cost reductions, increased capability, security and flexibility. S2S worked hand-in-hand with our client to define a cloud strategy and migration plan, then execute the required migration tasks that are delivering business value and driving IT change. The major steps completed as part of this effort, and which led to a seamless transition with no downtime were as follows:
- Create new servers
- Migrate, configure, and compile code
- Conduct development black box testing (fix and repair)
- Functional acceptance testing
- Configure external interfaces
- Perform cutover go-live
Impact: As a result of migrating to the cloud, the agency identified benefits that include: reduced cost in hardware and maintenance, improved operational efficiencies, increased security, consistent accessibility and connectivity, and reduced risk for data loss.
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