Allogy delivers high-impact, on-demand training for just-in-time learning for a mobile world. This includes Allogy’s application, Capillary, which is used to distribute trusted training to dispersed audiences across the world on the web or for mobile device-based application access. Allogy’s customer base includes government agencies and healthcare firms. Within the US federal government, Allogy provides cloud services to the Department of Defense (DoD) in support of the Joint Trauma Service’s (JTS) mission to govern Medical Readiness Training for service members.
Customer Challenge – Migration and NIST Compliance
In order to meet the FedRAMP requirements of its end customer, the Defense Health Agency (DHA), Allogy needed the Capillary application and its infrastructure to be active and in production within AWS GovCloud. As a result, they engaged VSO in order to leverage our deep expertise in AWS cloud architecture. VSO SMEs then quickly integrated with the larger Allogy team and facilitated their ability to meet customer requirements by completing the application migration within the strict timeline given.
Partner Solution
Defense Health Agency (DHA) had requested Capillary to become NIST 871 compliant and the Allogy team needed to take a variety of steps to attain this. VSO guided them through these steps and helped implement any changes required. VSO ran Prowler and Cloud Sweep scans to analyze Allogy’s current Impact Level 2 environment for vulnerabilities that needed remediation. Following this, VSO built a roadmap to attain the NIST compliance level required. The largest task was to migrate their application from its current AWS Impact Level 2 environment to an AWS Impact Level 4 environment. Allogy’s original DHA contract did not have NIST and DoD SRG compliance in-scope. Other tasks and redevelopment efforts were required to achieve this compliance. VSO provided architectural and development guidance as required to help keep the project on track.
Allogy’s services are provided to the Joint Trauma Service (JTS) in the form of web and mobile apps (Deployed Medicine), and a hosted website (www.deployedmedicine.com) for delivering the Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) curriculum. Effective August 1, 2019, Deployed Medicine was named in the DHA memo2 of 17-Sep-2019 as the Joint Repository for all current TCCC All Service Members (ASM) course curriculum, and the intended joint repository of all subsequent Tiers of TCCC course curriculum.
A dedicated Scrum Master led the effort and worked closely with the Product Owner and Development Team. They refined the Product Backlog to determine time and complexity as each Product Backlog Item (PBI) was defined and prioritized. During Sprint Planning, collaborative estimation exercises were conducted to assign Story Points (SP) to each PBI.
VSO had three main goals when approaching the scope of work asked for by the customer:
- Migrate the application to Amazon Web Services GovCloud.
- Implement High Availability and Disaster Recovery.
- Maintain all Compliance and Certification standards.
To accomplish these goals, VSO used a series of protocols and services to carefully, efficiently, and successfully fulfill the customers end goals. Firstly, VSO implemented a Landing Zone in the AWS GovCloud environment. A landing zone is a well-architected, multi-account environment that's based on security and compliance best practices. It is the enterprise-wide container that holds all of a client’s organizational units (OUs), accounts, users, and other resources that are subject to compliance regulation. They can scale to fit the needs of an enterprise of any size. Secondly, we migrated the client’s data into the appropriate AWS GovCloud offerings. EC2 instances were right sized for the application growth needs and appropriate storage tiers were deployed. RDS instances were migrated to GovCloud equivalents but, a new video processing application and format had to be chosen. The Capillary application code was refactored to support the new AWS GovCloud AWS Elemental MediaConvert video processing tool and its file format.
Results and Benefits
VSO successfully migrated Allogy’s infrastructure and application from the AWS Commercial Cloud to AWS GovCloud with minimal impact to business operations by accomplishing the migration during Allogy’s pre-approved monthly maintenance window. The Production environment was migrated to the new GovCloud environment that was preconfigured by VSO using AWS well architected best practices and frameworks. Allogy took advantage of the new account(s) structure in the GovCloud environment and deployed a structure to support a CI/CD pipeline. This reduced overall support efforts and costs by the Allogy team.
Premigration activities identified several areas of opportunities to right size and or reduce resources. VSO, in coordination with Allogy, was able to right size the storage footprint from 89 S3 buckets to 20 S3 Buckets and reduced the file migrations from greater than 20 million files to less than 1.5 million. This Allowed Allogy to not only save on storage size but on data transfers from one boundary to another.