Leidos modernizes U.S. Department of War biometric system to enhance mission readiness

Among its wide-ranging work with government and commercial organizations, Leidos supports mission-critical systems such as the U.S. DoW Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). DoW ABIS helps warfighters and partner agencies identify and track persons of interest using multiple biometric modalities, such as fingerprints and palm prints (including latent ones), iris scans, and facial recognition.

As operational demands increased, the on-premises DoW ABIS environment became constrained by costly hardware refresh cycles and slow scalability. Adding new capacity could take weeks or months, making it harder to roll out new biometric capabilities or respond rapidly during major operations. At the same time, moving DoW ABIS fully to the cloud required meeting stringent security and compliance requirements.

To address these challenges, Leidos partnered with the DoW to chart a secure and compliant migration path. The team proposed moving DoW ABIS to AWS GovCloud (US), beginning with a disaster recovery environment to validate the approach before pursuing a full migration alongside AWS Solutions Architects. Once validated, Leidos and AWS designed a highly resilient, cloud-native architecture built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for microservices and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), with networking solutions aligned to DISA SCCA standards.

To minimize operational disruptions, Leidos adopted an incremental approach through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program 2.0 (MAP 2.0), which provided a structured framework and clear guardrails for each stage of migration. The project was divided into nine increments, starting with foundational setup—configuring virtual private networks, firewalls, and shared security services. AWS specialists advised on networking, data analytics, and security to ensure resilience, compliance, and cost efficiency throughout.

Through AWS Enterprise Support, Leidos had access to a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) who led readiness reviews and provided ongoing architectural guidance to strengthen performance and reliability. Weekly working sessions kept both teams aligned on observability, containerization, and resource optimization strategies. “Both Leidos and AWS were entirely in sync, optimizing processes as we went through each migration increment from beginning to end—meaning we avoided any disruption,” says David Jones, senior program manager at Leidos.

AWS Enterprise Support also provided 24/7 access to frontline engineers and specialists who helped maintain momentum across migration phases. In addition, Leidos leveraged AWS Countdown, part of AWS Enterprise Support, to manage critical migration milestones. “The AWS Enterprise Support team provided critical architecture and scaling guidance,” adds Jeff Tucker, principal systems engineer at Leidos. “Their involvement accelerated our goal of adopting cloud-native services as we moved workloads from on premises to AWS.”

With support from AWS Enterprise Support, Leidos helped the DoW launch DoW ABIS on AWS GovCloud (US) without any disruption to warfighters or agency personnel who rely on continuous system access. The migration improved efficiency and reliability, enabling the program to reinvest time and resources into developing new capabilities that meet evolving mission needs. “We’re seeing 10–15 percent faster performance across all biometric modalities than when the system was on premises,” says Tucker. “On average, all Priority 1–4 responses process about 17 seconds faster.”

In steady-state operations, DoW ABIS is designed to scale on demand to more than double its baseline capacity, providing surge support for warfighters and partner agencies worldwide during major operations. The system is designed to rapidly scale to ingest and analyze new biometric data within minutes, a task that previously required weeks or even months in an on-premises environment. “With a cloud foundation on AWS GovCloud (US), DoW ABIS can more easily expand to new modalities or integrate advanced matching algorithms to give our warfighters an advantage on the modern battlefield,” says Bob Johnston, principal solution architect at Leidos.

The modernization also unlocked new capabilities, including virtual workstations for remote biometric examination and voice recognition as an additional modality. Together, these innovations are intended to enhance operational resilience and agility, helping the DoW to adapt faster and support its global security mission with greater confidence.