About the Customer
A successful modernization program is a marathon, not a sprint, and Effectual has been able to provide our customer with strategic guidance, expertise, and innovative solutions from the beginning of their modernization journey. As a government-owned organization responsible for facilitating the flow of capital into the US housing market, our customer serves a vital role in helping Americans achieve home ownership and supporting the broader housing finance sector. Effectual executed a large-scale data center consolidation, migrating the customer’s legacy systems and data from multiple data centers to a unified AWS cloud solution.
The Challenge
Due to the critical nature of their business and the volume of sensitive data being processed, the customer needed Effectual to execute a seamless migration and deliver a highly available solution capable of meeting stringent compliance standards. Effectual Modernization Engineers™ designed and implemented a solution with AWS that was able to meet those needs while also enabling automation capabilities and, more importantly, laying the groundwork for ongoing modernization and optimization.
However, acclimating to a wholly new environment can be overwhelming, and the combination of skills gaps and poor practices can quickly negate the benefits of cloud adoption. Monitoring and alerting configurations provide valuable performance data, but unless properly configured, these alerts could tax support resources as they sift through countless notifications to determine which ones might be potentially disruptive. Additionally, using tools and applications primarily designed for on-premises deployments can negatively impact performance, increasing cloud consumption and costs.
Effectual continued working with the customer following the successful data center consolidation and cloud migration, providing management and support in addition to strategic guidance on the customer’s overall modernization programs. As a managed service provider with resources embedded within the customer organization, Effectual proactively identified potential risks and opportunities for improvement.
The Solution
The initial environment, configurations, and solution were suitable for the customer’s needs, but once they were operating in the cloud, they were positioned to lean into the next phase of their modernization and focus on optimization, updating toolsets, and process improvement. Through a combination of professional and managed services, Effectual was able to gain in-depth knowledge of the customer’s operational requirements, long- and short-term digital strategy, risk tolerance, and available in-house technical resources to make informed recommendations aligned with the customer’s vision.
Developing this level of trust and understanding was pivotal in identifying the most impactful modernization projects and optimal tooling recommendations.
Ensuring Successful Day 2 Operations to Maintain Ongoing Compliance in AWS GovCloud
Once the environment was built with strict adherence to NIST 800-53, FISMA Moderate, and FedRAMP High compliance standards, a centralized Command Center was deployed as a focal point to ensure all Day 2 operations maintained compliance as the environment scaled and changed over time.
Within the Command Center, multiple industry-leading, agent-based software tools are employed to automatically scan Linux and Windows EC2 instances for vulnerabilities defined by the rigorous regulatory standards named above. These scans are facilitated by agents installed on each EC2 instance through an Ansible playbook, which customizes the deployment images to enforce compliance. Any non-compliant findings are flagged and reported to security personnel, enabling swift corrective action to maintain a high-security standard.
With this Command Center and the automation it enables, the customer experiences reduced time-to-market for applications and a decrease in the time application teams spend on configuration and maintenance tasks. By centralizing compliance and security management, Platform and Operations Teams are freed from deployment-related activities, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks such as innovation, cost management, and audit preparation. This strategic shift not only strengthens the organization’s compliance posture but also enhances operational agility and positions teams to deliver business value more efficiently.
Enhancing Monitoring and Alerting
One of the most immediate opportunities identified was improving monitoring and alerting capabilities, and Effectual addressed this need by building an enterprise-level observability platform using Datadog. Applications teams now have their own unique tenants and dashboards where they can customize monitoring and alerting on the servers, databases, and services to focus on the metrics that matter most to them. This has enabled the teams supporting the customer’s applications on AWS to more quickly identify and respond to issues that could impact application performance and provide insights for fine-tuning application performance.
Modernizing File Storage
The customer was using NetApp ONTAP (purchased through the AWS Marketplace) for file storage, but wanted a cloud-native service that would complement their investment in AWS and offer the same level of agility. Since they were already using NetApp ONTAP, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP was the ideal cloud-native option because it would allow them to continue leveraging NetApp ONTAP in their AWS environment. Amazon FSx is also an AWS managed service, helping streamline and simplify management of the file storage solution.
Meeting Regulatory Compliance Requirements
Effectual understood the importance of maintaining compliance with federal and industry-specific regulations was a critical priority for our customer. Effectual identified improvements to streamlining logging and log shipping by building a log aggregation platform across all of the customer’s AWS accounts. The platform used Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to aggregate and ship CloudWatch logs, Amazon S3 for secure log storage, and Splunk to index and analyze the logs.
The Results
Through a combination of strategic guidance, modernization, optimization, and ongoing support from Effectual, our customer has been able to fully realize the benefits of cloud adoption while maintaining regulatory compliance and increasing operational efficiency.
The enhanced monitoring and alerting capabilities introduced a new level of observability to help improve application performance and reduce costs by identifying areas for optimization. Modernizing the file storage solution has simplified management by utilizing an Amazon managed service. Streamlining logging and log shipping, has allowed the customer to efficiently maintain regulatory compliance while also improving log analysis and their overall security posture.
In addition to these tangible results, working closely with Effectual has enabled our customer to gain a deeper understanding of their cloud environment and continue maturing their modernization strategy.
