Booz Allen speeds migration and reduces costs for a US government agency with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

Moving sensitive US government data to the cloud requires the meticulous application of a proven migration methodology, skilled resources, a robust solution, and a mature logistics model. A US government agency elected to move its Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) system from a virtualized, on-premise environment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Booz Allen performed the migration and used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and AWS Snow Family of devices as mechanisms to help the customer save time, reduce costs, and increase their agility to develop new features for their constituents.

AWS MAP accelerates migration timetable and reduces cost

Booz Allen launched the project in Spring 2022. This was the first time the government agency and Booz Allen used MAP. MAP is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based on AWS’s experience migrating thousands of customers to the cloud. MAP provides tools that reduce costs and help automate and accelerate execution, and offers tailored training approaches and content, with expertise from partners in the AWS Partner Network, and AWS investment. MAP uses a proven three-phased framework—Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate and Modernize—to help customers achieve migration goals. Through MAP, AWS customers can build strong AWS Cloud foundations, reduce risk, and offset the initial cost of migrations.

Migrating to AWS requires expertise, tools, and alignment of business and IT strategy. Many organizations can accelerate their migration and time to results with AWS Partners, like Booz Allen. In order to leverage AWS investments as a part of MAP, an AWS Partner must hold the AWS Migration Competency. Booz Allen holds this designation and has demonstrated they can help customers migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS.

For this project, Booz Allen used MAP as an accelerator and risk reducer when the project faced schedule challenges. MAP helped highlight and validate the importance of a collaborative team approach between the customer, AWS Partner, and AWS as a key success driver. By using MAP, Booz Allen accelerated the migration schedule by 33% (45 days) to meet required customer deadlines and drop the overall cost of the migration by 6%.

How Booz Allen used MAP and AWS to securely migrate 2PB of government data

To start, Booz Allen performed a MAP-driven assessment of the government agency’s current security operations solution, including requirements, sizing, performance, and compliance. Prior to the assessment, the requirements for the system were largely unknown. The assessment revealed that the government system must: 1) support a baseline of 2 PB of data and have the ability to scale; 2) be available to a wide range of missions, businesses, and security teams, 24/7; and 3) experience zero system downtime during the migration

To meet these requirements, Booz Allen selected AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized Devices, which are designed to be transportable and to facilitate large data migrations. Booz Allen used 32 devices, each with 80 TB storage, and performed the migration in multiple waves with six AWS Snowball devices at a time. Booz Allen completed the migration of current users, processes, and information from the on-premise Splunk system, including the development of a standard operating model as a MAP-driven best practice.

Booz Allen provisioned and configured all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, access to AWS native resources including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon CloudWatch using infrastructure as code (IAC), and automation and installation of Splunk on AWS.

The integrated Splunk software on AWS is used 24/7 by hundreds of end users for data analysis, troubleshooting, compliance, and daily operations. The Booz Allen solution using Splunk on AWS facilitated integration, testing, troubleshooting, tuning, and connectivity to on-premise and cloud-based systems.

With AWS, the solution scales with growing demand and protects the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of stored data and objects. To facilitate seamless patching, upgrades, and enhancements, the Splunk on AWS solution includes development, pre-production, and production environments in AWS GovCloud (US) with all capabilities replicated in each environment—although run times and capacities are tailored in each environment to optimize cloud infrastructure costs. The AWS GovCloud (US) also offers an isolated environment, compliant with the agency’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High requirements.

Migrating securely to Splunk on AWS with zero downtime

The migration was performed with zero system downtime. This project highlighted collaboration, MAP best practices, and flagship technical solutions including Splunk on AWS and Snowball devices as key success factors. These success factors enabled the US government agency to adopt cloud computing via a seamless migration delivered by Booz Allen. The customer gained efficiencies in operations by moving to the AWS Cloud and can now scale more effectively as data grows, and increase agility in delivering new features for their constituents.

Learn more about migrations for government

Learn more about how you can speed up migrations of large data and systems to the cloud with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and the AWS Snow Family.

Read more about how Booz Allen delivers Federal mission migrations with AWS Cloud solutions. Visit the AWS for Government hub to learn more about how governments around the world use AWS to support their missions.

Read more about AWS Cloud for government:

• How Natural Resources Canada migrated petabytes of geospatial data to the cloud
• Delivering better Medicaid services (and happier teams) with the AWS Cloud
• Use Migration Evaluator in protected or regulated environments by anonymizing sensitive network data
• Why moving to the cloud should be part of your sustainability strategy
• How the US DOJ Tax Division built a remote telework application in six weeks with AWS
• Ordering free COVID-19 test kits with the help of the cloud

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