Operationalizing AWS Pilot and Proof-of-Concept Apps | Federal Civilian

Federal civilian agencies frequently work with in-house engineering teams or partner with contract teams including AWS Professional Services to develop pilot or proof-of-concept (POC) applications to explore new capabilities, validate architectures, or demonstrate mission value. These pilots often succeed in demonstrating feasibility, but agencies commonly require additional support to tailor and deploy apps within their own enterprise IT environment, AWS tenancy, governance model, and operational constraints. In many cases, teams developing pilots are unable to support production or long-term operational transition services, creating a gap between innovation and adoption.

The Triple Point Security Operationalizing AWS Pilot and Proof-of-Concept Apps service is designed to bridge this gap. Tailored to support federal civilian clients, we help agencies transition pilot solutions, whether developed by AWS, a third party, or internal teams, into operational, agency-owned cloud systems that align with enterprise architecture, security expectations, and operational practices.

Understanding the Pilot and Agency Context

We begin by working with agency stakeholders and, where applicable, AWS or other third-party teams, to understand the scope, intent, and technical design of the pilot solution. This includes reviewing available artifacts such as source code, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), reference architectures, and existing pilot documentation. We also work with agency teams to understand the target operating environment, including enterprise identity, networking, security tooling, and existing AWS account and landing zone structures.

This discovery phase ensures that pilot solutions are adapted, rather than simply copied, into environments governed by federal requirements, shared services, and other agency-specific constraints.

Deploying and Integrating Within Agency AWS Environments

We support standing up pilot solutions within agency-managed AWS accounts, whether as standalone accounts or within an existing agency organization and landing zone. This may include provisioning new accounts, configuring networking and connectivity, integrating enterprise identity and federation, and aligning deployments with agency guardrails and configuration standards.

Our approach emphasizes consistency with agency architecture patterns and reuse of existing shared services wherever possible to speed the operationalization process, helping agencies avoid fragmented or non-standard cloud environments as pilots transition into operational use as seamlessly as possible.

Establishing DevOps and Operational Foundations

Operationalizing a pilot requires more than initial deployment. We assist agencies in establishing DevOps practices aligned with their maturity and governance model, including deployment pipelines, environment separation, configuration management, and version control. Where applicable, we integrate security considerations directly into these workflows to support downstream authorization and continuous monitoring activities.

This service is designed to complement, not replace, agency engineering teams, providing practical enablement while supporting long-term maintainability and ownership of the solution.

Documentation, Knowledge Transfer, and O&M Readiness

A core component of this offering is preparing agencies for sustained operations and maintenance (O&M). We support the development of deployment and operational documentation using agency-preferred templates, tools, and collaboration platforms, such as internal wikis or repositories. Documentation is tailored to support onboarding of operations staff, troubleshooting, future enhancements, and eventual security assessments or audits.

By emphasizing documentation and knowledge transfer, we help agencies reduce operational risk and dependency on pilot-phase assumptions or external resources. Where agency teams lack resources for long-term O&M, our complementary O&M professional services offering can help maintain and iterate on applications once they are in production.

Alignment with Authorization and Lifecycle Activities

While this service can be used independently, it is often performed prior to or in parallel with Authorization to Operate (ATO) activities under the NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF). Decisions made during pilot operationalization, such as architecture design, logging, monitoring, and automation, can significantly affect authorization timelines and long-term compliance. Our approach ensures that operationalized solutions are well positioned for authorization, continuous monitoring, and future scaling, and our complementary ATO professional service offering can be combined for support with the authorization lifecycle.

This service applies to solutions hosted on AWS and AWS GovCloud (US) and commonly relates to AWS services used for compute, networking, identity and access management, CI/CD, logging, and monitoring.