Booz Allen Cloud Solutions

Cloud migration of any workload can be a disruptive exercise. After all, mission operations can’t be suspended while your application is being moved to a cloud-based infrastructure. Multiplied across a complex enterprise with hundreds or thousands of workloads, migration must be smart and precise, with readiness assessed from the code level to the workforce itself. This is why Booz Allen SmartCloud offerings prioritize minimizing disruption to current workflows in moving any applications and operations into the cloud.

Built by Booz Allen and integrated with CAST Highlight, SmartLift™ accelerates the migration process with a comprehensive and automated analysis for cloud readiness so enterprises can prioritize, sequence, and address risks before moving complex infrastructures to a multitude of cloud-native environments. For a fully integrated migration solution, we’ve embedded our trusted, data-driven framework from Bento so organizations can access modeling, business variables, code analysis, budget estimates, and planning all in one dashboard. By choosing the right approach, migrations can be designed with minimization in mind.

This starts with choosing the right migration approach, minimizing the impact of necessary trade-offs and disruption considerations. Rehosting, redeployment, repackaging, refactoring, retiring, among others, each come with unique benefits. Sometimes, a "lift-and-shift" framework that prioritizes speed to launch by retaining core functionality before adding more complex and specialized tools and processes seems best. However, while minimizing initial disruptions, it is difficult to scale, and as needed complexity comes, so too does disruption. Refactoring or re-architecting an application at the outset to enable greater cloud-native features can improve performance and enable scale and may be worth the upfront efforts.

Regardless of the migration approach, we leverage proven, human-centric project management approaches to develop realistic, clearly communicated roadmaps, and agile methodology to plan, build, and carefully roll out incremental changes. In addition, related strategies that we employ to keep transitions as seamless as they are impactful include:

• Parallel development: For short sprints, we test new development beside current processes to ensure a full understanding for all users.
• Phased data and functionality migration: We migrate data, tools, and users in a deliberate fashion, employing change management to promote speedy, painless adoption of new processes, tools, and interfaces.
• Canary Releases and Rollback Patterns: We maintain a persistent recovery plan that will restore all legacy data, access, environmental configuration, and functions should any dimension of the migration not meet expectations.
• Focus groups: We use focus groups to test new tools and user adoption strategies to help get workforces up to speed as quickly and smoothly as possible.

For years, CSPs such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud were the primary landing zone choices for public sector, mission-critical workloads, but low code/no code (LCNC) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools have expanded the menu as they have recently matured their capabilities and attained the accreditation to host more sensitive data. Our SmartCloud offering can help our clients understand the benefits and constraints of their various options and choose what’s right for them.

Advantages of CSPs include inherent flexibility, mobility, and scalability for custom-built applications, and tailored patterns of data recovery and available zones of accessibility. Most also offer tools and services that fit together right out of the box, layers of security and provisioning for precise user-access control, and, similarly to SaaS, managed services without vendor lock-in.

Challenges associated with CSPs include a slightly larger risk of performance issues or outages if failover patterns are not configured properly, an ongoing need for continuous upskilling for developers and engineers to maintain a high-quality environment, and a longer, more difficult migration and build. There are also some instances where a task that would require multiple CSPs can be addressed with a single SaaS solution.

One advantage of SaaS and some LCNC offerings is that the provider takes responsibility for maintaining servers, databases, and software. This is easier to scale and, at times, secure, which can help expedite delivery time. With the provider taking on so much of the heavy lifting, these alternative options mean that clients face less pressure to continuously upskill their workforces.

But these advantages must be balanced against higher licensing costs, contracts that can create vendor lock-in, less autonomy over security and scalability, and less ability to customize for specialized business needs.

Maintaining a cloud environment can be a balancing act of prioritizing current needs, challenges, and budget with innovation, long-term scalability, and future goals. Managing cloud efforts, especially at scale, requires first choosing the right cloud migration strategy at the start to reduce costly re-work over time, followed by setting disciplined management and governance practices and embracing automation. Leveraging repeatable patterns, accelerators, and partner tooling in our SmartCloud portfolio, we help clients to:

• Establish clear cloud governance to prevent unnecessary resource sprawl and enable automation-first compliance. Governance must provide guidelines to inform and policies to enforce the best, agreed-upon practices for resource provisioning, access, and utilization.
• Be disciplined and transparent in financial forecasting and budget enforcement: Enable cloud operations teams with analytics they need to drive budgeting assumptions and learn from spend over time. Enhanced tracking, tagging, and categorizing of resource allocations by project or purpose at a granular level enables cost visibility and allows for forecasting adjustments. Once budgets are set, teams can enforce budget thresholds and provide auto-alerts on usage and data storage patterns to nudge change at pre-defined levels of spend in a disciplined manner to enhance cost controls.
• Optimize the portfolio at the enterprise level routinely to right-size and innovate. Underutilized instances, services, and storage happen. Tools age and become underutilized and need to be replaced with more advanced alternatives. Alternatively, portfolio reviews enable data-driven decisions around products and services that will be needed and support future planning.
• Require onboarding approval for new tenants to ensure resources are tied to value drivers. Having a stage-gate around approvals adds a layer of control and accountability while also ensuring operations teams can manage capacity and scale where there is anticipated value to be gained.

With governance guardrails and policy controls in place, we suggest arming developers with self-service tools that focus on clear and discoverable reuse, scaffolds, and best-practice patterns via a developer portal to reduce costly development frictions. Instead of creating per-application pipelines, for example, our SmartFactory approach accelerates the creation of tool-agnostic, templated workflows in dedicated libraries that can be updated once and used by multiple teams at scale. We suggest beginning with the following:

• Leverage pre-configured baselines: Adopt best practices like microservices and containerization to enable development teams to work independently on discrete components and pre-configured baselines, architectures, and patterns to promote faster innovation, shorter development cycles, and increased agility in responding to changing demands.
• Drive optimization through Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Our SmartCloud approach emphasizes the use of IaC tools, enabling clients to provision and manage resources in a consistent and automated manner. This helps optimize resource allocation, eliminating wasteful spending and ensuring that your cloud environment is finely tuned for performance and cost efficiency.
• Secure and automate governance: A lack of focus on security can result in costly downtime when developing in the cloud. We integrate robust security controls and governance mechanisms into our SmartCloud approach and develop cloud-native baselines and accelerators.
• Improve the developer experience with streamlined delivery pipelines and repeatable tooling: With expertise in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), we bring our SmartFactory offering to establish robust pipelines that automate the build, test, and deployment processes. This approach helps avoid technical debt by controlling pipeline code checks that do not allow high-risk code into higher environments and results in faster time-to-market for applications, reduced manual effort, and improved software quality—while improving the developer experience at a time when talent retention is vital.
  

As a cyber trailblazer, Booz Allen is trusted by leaders in civilian government, intelligence, defense, and Fortune 500 companies to ensure security is built in from the start—mitigating threats to cloud environments and ensuring compliance before anything is configured. Our cloud solutions experts have applied and refined best practices over more than 1,000 large-scale migrations. As a member of the Cloud Security Alliance, we’re a leader in promoting best practices for security assurance in cloud computing along with being part of their Global Consultancy Program. We’re also the only partner authorized to provide accreditation and authorization services for the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Commercial Cloud Services program.

• Enable resilience at scale: Failures may happen, but resiliency measures encapsulated in the Booz Allen SmartCloud approach can be built into cloud-native services that enable our clients to react to issues with minimal disruption to operations. There are many resiliency features cloud provides, but these require a different architecture than traditional, non-virtualized systems. Our SmartFactory offering can enable clients in leveraging container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, that support auto-scaling, fault tolerance, and more, ensuring smooth operations even during peak loads for missions that cannot go down and cannot be compromised.
• Lead with security: With SmartDefense, cloud security is never bolted on—it can be integrated into every step of every cloud journey. SmartDefense offers comprehensive blueprints for integrated cybersecurity services and capabilities for system protection, access control, monitoring, and compliance with the latest industry cloud security standards and zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles. This includes encryption at rest and continuous, automated security monitoring throughout the technology stack. To provide a scalable cloud security architecture, our SmartDefense approach leverages Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD)—an affordable, integrated cloud security suite that can reduce the time to establish an initial cloud platform from weeks to minutes.
• Keep data secure: There are multiple ways to mitigate risk for data residing on a cloud-based server. Maintaining an iterative, multi-tendency, multi-region backup can simultaneously ensure data security and bring down outage risk. Proactively investigating data threats as part of a comprehensive security strategy helps ensure protection from external bad actors. Using encryption keys, envelope encryption, and securing user access to role-based controls protects data vulnerabilities that can arise from user error.