Booz Allen speeds migration and reduces costs for a US government agency with the Amazon Web Services Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

Moving sensitive US government data to the cloud requires the meticulous application of a proven migration methodology, skilled resources, a robust solution, and a mature logistics model. A US government agency elected to move its Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) system from a virtualized, on-premise environment to the Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. Booz Allen performed the migration and used the Amazon Web Services Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and Amazon Web Services Snow Family of devices as mechanisms to help the customer save time, reduce costs, and increase their agility to develop new features for their constituents.

Amazon Web Services MAP accelerates migration timetable and reduces cost

Booz Allen launched the project in Spring 2022. This was the first time the government agency and Booz Allen used MAP. MAP is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based on Amazon Web Services’s experience migrating thousands of customers to the cloud. MAP provides tools that reduce costs and help automate and accelerate execution, and offers tailored training approaches and content, with expertise from partners in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network, and Amazon Web Services investment. MAP uses a proven three-phased framework—Assess, Mobilize, and Migrate and Modernize—to help customers achieve migration goals. Through MAP, Amazon Web Services customers can build strong Amazon Web Services Cloud foundations, reduce risk, and offset the initial cost of migrations.

Migrating to Amazon Web Services requires expertise, tools, and alignment of business and IT strategy. Many organizations can accelerate their migration and time to results with Amazon Web Services Partners, like Booz Allen. In order to leverage Amazon Web Services investments as a part of MAP, an Amazon Web Services Partner must hold the Amazon Web Services Migration Competency . Booz Allen holds this designation and has demonstrated they can help customers migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to Amazon Web Services.

For this project, Booz Allen used MAP as an accelerator and risk reducer when the project faced schedule challenges. MAP helped highlight and validate the importance of a collaborative team approach between the customer, Amazon Web Services Partner, and Amazon Web Services as a key success driver. By using MAP, Booz Allen accelerated the migration schedule by 33% (45 days) to meet required customer deadlines and drop the overall cost of the migration by 6%.

How Booz Allen used MAP and Amazon Web Services to securely migrate 2PB of government data

To start, Booz Allen performed a MAP-driven assessment of the government agency’s current security operations solution, including requirements, sizing, performance, and compliance. Prior to the assessment, the requirements for the system were largely unknown. The assessment revealed that the government system must: 1) support a baseline of 2 PB of data and have the ability to scale; 2) be available to a wide range of missions, businesses, and security teams, 24/7; and 3) experience zero system downtime during the migration

To meet these requirements, Booz Allen selected Amazon Web Services Snowball Edge Storage Optimized Devices , which are designed to be transportable and to facilitate large data migrations. Booz Allen used 32 devices, each with 80 TB storage, and performed the migration in multiple waves with six Amazon Web Services Snowball devices at a time. Booz Allen completed the migration of current users, processes, and information from the on-premise Splunk system, including the development of a standard operating model as a MAP-driven best practice.

Booz Allen provisioned and configured all Amazon Web Services Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, access to Amazon Web Services native resources including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( Amazon EC2 ), Amazon Simple Storage Service ( Amazon S3 ), and Amazon CloudWatch using infrastructure as code (IAC), and automation and installation of Splunk on Amazon Web Services.

The integrated Splunk software on Amazon Web Services is used 24/7 by hundreds of end users for data analysis, troubleshooting, compliance, and daily operations. The Booz Allen solution using Splunk on Amazon Web Services facilitated integration, testing, troubleshooting, tuning, and connectivity to on-premise and cloud-based systems.

With Amazon Web Services, the solution scales with growing demand and protects the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of stored data and objects. To facilitate seamless patching, upgrades, and enhancements, the Splunk on Amazon Web Services solution includes development, pre-production, and production environments in Amazon Web Services GovCloud (US) with all capabilities replicated in each environment—although run times and capacities are tailored in each environment to optimize cloud infrastructure costs. The Amazon Web Services GovCloud (US) also offers an isolated environment, compliant with the agency’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program ( FedRAMP ) High requirements.

Migrating securely to Splunk on Amazon Web Services with zero downtime

The migration was performed with zero system downtime. This project highlighted collaboration, MAP best practices, and flagship technical solutions including Splunk on Amazon Web Services and Snowball devices as key success factors. These success factors enabled the US government agency to adopt cloud computing via a seamless migration delivered by Booz Allen. The customer gained efficiencies in operations by moving to the Amazon Web Services Cloud and can now scale more effectively as data grows, and increase agility in delivering new features for their constituents.

Learn more about migrations for government

Learn more about how you can speed up migrations of large data and systems to the cloud with the Amazon Web Services Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and the Amazon Web Services Snow Family .

Read more about how Booz Allen delivers Federal mission migrations with Amazon Web Services Cloud solutions. Visit the Amazon Web Services for Government hub to learn more about how governments around the world use Amazon Web Services to support their missions.

Read more about Amazon Web Services Cloud for government:

• How Natural Resources Canada migrated petabytes of geospatial data to the cloud
• Delivering better Medicaid services (and happier teams) with the Amazon Web Services Cloud
• Use Migration Evaluator in protected or regulated environments by anonymizing sensitive network data
• Why moving to the cloud should be part of your sustainability strategy
• How the US DOJ Tax Division built a remote telework application in six weeks with Amazon Web Services
• Ordering free COVID-19 test kits with the help of the cloud

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