Booz Allen Hamilton's Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD) Essentials provides an automated solution for deploying a secure AWS environment, reducing the time to establish an initial cloud platform from weeks to minutes. VCD Essentials consists of a single AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with two Availability Zones deployed within a customer's AWS account. VCD Essentials deploys a Sophos UTM9 NextGen Firewall with auto-scaling and High Availability in public subnets and creates private web, application, and database subnets where customers securely host their applications. The Sophos UTM9 appliance delivers in-depth network inspection capabilities to protect customer web applications from advanced threats. VCD Essentials also deploys, configures, and integrates AWS native services as best-practice security features that include: Encryption at Rest using AWS KMS; Role Based Access Control using AWS IAM; logging of AWS resources and events with VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail, and Config; monitoring using CloudWatch; automated backup of EBS volumes using Lambda and CloudWatch Events; and network segmentation with public and private subnets, Elastic Load Balancers, and Security Groups. VCD Essentials uses CloudFormation templates and Sophos UTM9 APIs to automatically deploy this foundational cloud environment that accelerates customer migration. Additional information for deploying VCD Essentials can be found in the Quick Start Guide in the Additional Resources section below.