How the Maritime Cloud Environment accelerates Navy shipbuilding

To restore America’s maritime dominance, the US Navy must accelerate ship and submarine production. The Executive Order “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” established policy directing the Department of War (DoW) in coordination with Cabinet secretaries to rebuild and secure maritime manufacturing capabilities, expand the Maritime Industrial Base, and improve procurement efficiency. However, many of the Navy’s 124,000+ suppliers operate on disconnected, legacy IT systems and have not adopted modern digital engineering processes—creating cybersecurity gaps, siloing design data, and driving up costs. In this post, you will learn how the Maritime Cloud Environment (MCE) addresses these challenges by offering suppliers a secure, compliant, Navy-provided Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud environment for digital engineering collaboration.

The challenge: A fragmented industrial base

The Navy’s maritime supplier network spans all 50 states, with each supplier maintaining its own IT infrastructure, engineering tools, and processes. This fragmented approach creates serious problems:

• The Navy lacks real-time visibility into supplier data – Consider this scenario: an engineer at a Tier 2 supplier updates a valve design. That change might not reach the shipyard or the Navy for weeks. In the meantime, staff at every level spend valuable time manually collecting data from different systems, making phone calls, and sending emails to track down information that should flow automatically. Production bottlenecks occur when suppliers can’t share 3D engineering models directly with each other or with shipyards.
• Cybersecurity gaps put sensitive data at risk – A 2019 Navy Cybersecurity Readiness Review found significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities across the naval enterprise and highlighted material supply chain risk. The review also noted that small businesses in the defense industrial base often lack the resources and training needed to implement robust cybersecurity measures. These concerns remain urgent: a July 2025 Secretary of Defense memorandum directed immediate action to secure DoW information technology against supply chain attacks and stated that the DoW CIO would use programs including Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) to strengthen security and reduce adversarial foreign influence in the defense industrial base.
• CMMC 2.0 compliance creates significant cost burden – The DoW developed CMMC 2.0 to strengthen cybersecurity—a requirement reinforced by the Secretary of Defense’s 2025 directive. However, compliance requires significant investment. According to DefenseScoop, CMMC Level 3 compliance costs range from $490,000 for small organizations to $21.1 million for large ones. These costs flow back to the Navy through contract pricing or force small suppliers out of the market entirely.

What MCE does: A shared environment for digital engineering

MCE is a collaborative solution from AWS, Deloitte, Siemens, and Stigian Consulting. It provides a Navy-owned, contractor-operated cloud environment where suppliers access standardized digital engineering tools without building their own IT infrastructure.

For suppliers, MCE alleviates the IT burden. Instead of building CMMC-compliant infrastructure independently, suppliers access preconfigured templates for engineering tools already meeting DoW security and data standards. Deloitte’s Security Operations Center (SOC) provides around-the-clock cybersecurity monitoring and incident response, using AWS security services including Amazon GuardDuty for threat detection, AWS Security Hub for centralized security management, AWS CloudTrail for audit logging, and Amazon Security Lake for centralized security data analytics. The environment also includes help desk support and compliance documentation. Suppliers can start working in days rather than spending months preparing for CMMC audits.

Preconfigured tools reduce the barrier to adoption. Suppliers often struggle to implement digital engineering because they face too many tool choices, complex integration requirements, and unclear starting points. MCE addresses this by providing templates for common digital engineering configurations that already meet DoW security and engineering standards. Suppliers don’t need to evaluate dozens of tools, negotiate licenses, configure integrations, and achieve security compliance independently. Instead, they access a ready-to-use environment where these decisions have already been made and validated.

MCE includes the following features:

• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – Siemens’ Teamcenter® software manages engineering data, Bills of Materials (BOM), and configuration changes across suppliers
• Computer-Aided Design (CAD) – Siemens’ Designcenter™ NX™ software makes it possible for engineers to create and modify 3D models that multiple teams can access simultaneously
• Simulation and analysis tools – Engineers test designs digitally before committing to physical production
• Manufacturing Execution and Operations Management – Siemens’ Opcenter™ software provides monitoring and operational visibility across the production environment, and shop floor production connects directly to engineering models so manufacturing instructions derive from approved designs
• Low-code application development – Suppliers can use the Mendix™ low-code platform to rapidly build custom applications—such as dashboards, capacity trackers, and collaborative design modules—with standard APIs enabling effective data integration

For the Navy, MCE creates a digital thread from design through maintenance. Following the DoW’s Digital Engineering Strategy, MCE connects engineering data across every phase of a ship’s life. Engineering models created during initial design connect to manufacturing instructions, which connect to maintenance records throughout the ship’s operational life. When a ship moves from a private construction yard to a public repair facility, the maintenance team accesses accurate, current 3D models instead of working from outdated drawings.

Consider the previously mentioned valve design scenario with MCE: when the Tier 2 supplier updates a valve design, that change propagates automatically through the digital thread. The Tier 1 supplier sees the updated model in their assembly. The shipyard receives current manufacturing instructions. The Navy tracks the change and its impact on overall ship design. No one waits for file transfers or manually reconciles different versions.

MCE runs on AWS at DoW Impact Level 5 (IL5) with plans for Impact Level 6 (IL6) in the future. AWS GovCloud (US) at IL5 handles Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and Unclassified Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (uNNPI), and AWS Secret Cloud at IL6 supports classified data up to SECRET. In AWS GovCloud (US), MCE uses Cloud Native Access Point (CNAP), helping suppliers connect securely over the internet without the delays and cost involved setting up dedicated DoW network connections. Zero Trust security principles verify users and devices, encrypt data, and enforce least privilege throughout.

Results the Navy and suppliers can expect

MCE offers the following benefits:

• Cost reduction across the industrial base – Centralizing IT infrastructure avoids duplication across suppliers, reducing distributed CMMC compliance and software licensing costs and delivering first-year savings across the supply chain.
• Faster production and onboarding – New suppliers begin contributing in days instead of spending months building IT systems. MCE targets onboarding 2,500 suppliers in its first 3 years, supporting the Executive Order’s directive to use commercial acquisition practices that accelerate shipbuilding.
• Improved security posture – Supplier engineering data resides in a centralized monitored environment with continuous threat detection. Commercial cyber monitoring operates around the clock, reducing the attack surface from 124,000 potential entry points.

The team building MCE

Four companies are collaborating to deliver MCE. Together, they deliver an environment where the Navy owns infrastructure and data while suppliers access commercial-grade tools:

• AWS provides DoW-compliant cloud infrastructure at IL5 and IL6.
• Deloitte Consulting LLP brings cybersecurity and digital transformation capabilities from its experience supporting the Navy.
• Siemens provides digital engineering software including Teamcenter and NX CAD.
• Stigian Consulting contributes experience designing Navy and NAVSEA cloud infrastructure and DevSecOps capabilities.

Conclusion

Our nation should build and maintain ships faster to sustain America’s maritime dominance. MCE gives the industrial base a single, secure shipbuilding digital engineering environment where suppliers collaborate—reducing costs, accelerating production, and strengthening cybersecurity.

For Navy and NAVSEA leaders, MCE offers a path to achieve the Executive Order’s directives for expanding the Maritime Industrial Base. Contact the MCE team to discuss integration with existing Navy cloud infrastructure.

For industrial base suppliers (current suppliers seeking CMMC compliance or potential new suppliers entering the defense market), MCE provides a ready-to-use environment with the tools and security you need.

For more information, contact us-navy-shipbuilding@amazon.com.