Modernizing a Mission-Critical Federal Platform with Secure Cloud Transformation

A large U.S. government agency responsible for delivering public services and safeguarding citizen data faced increasing pressure to modernize its legacy IT systems. Its outdated, on-premises infrastructure was limiting innovation, scalability, and cost efficiency—yet the agency’s operations remained mission-critical and subject to rigorous federal security and compliance requirements.

Customer Challenge

The agency needed to migrate its aging infrastructure to a secure, scalable cloud environment without disrupting vital public-facing services. Key requirements included:

• Meeting FISMA Moderate and FedRAMP security compliance
• Migrating nine complex, interdependent applications
• Maintaining uninterrupted service during and after the migration
• Operating across a distributed, multi-account environment with varying workloads
• Gaining visibility into cloud spending while optimizing costs and scaling usage

Balancing modernization, compliance, and operational continuity posed significant challenges for a federal agency managing over $7M in annual cloud spend.

Effectual Solution

Effectual designed and deployed a secure, enterprise-grade AWS environment tailored to federal compliance and performance needs. Core components of the solution included:

• Multi-account AWS architecture spanning 195 accounts across multiple regions, enabling high availability and disaster recovery through multi-region failover
• Zero-trust security framework with continuous FISMA Moderate compliance and centralized visibility via AWS Security Hub
• DevOps automation layer powered by CloudFormation, Terraform, Jenkins, and GitHub Enterprise for CI/CD orchestration and Infrastructure-as-Code standardization
• Three-tier automation system (Chef, Jenkins, GitHub Enterprise) to manage configuration, deployment, and workflows
• Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to establish governance and standards across all cloud operations
• Cost management tools including CloudCheckr and AWS tagging models for granular chargebacks and usage reporting

Results and Benefits

Effectual’s secure cloud transformation empowered the agency to meet its modernization and compliance goals without compromising on performance:

Security Excellence

• Maintained FISMA Moderate compliance throughout migration
• Achieved “Exceptional” System Security Posture for 10 of 11 months
• Closed 9 POA&Ms, including previously risk-accepted items
• Maintained 98% security posture rating from the agency’s Office of the CIO

Operational Impact

• Seamless migration of 9 complex applications (including the main website) within 12 months
• Increased public data access from <1M to ~10M downloads annually
• Streamlined operations across 195 managed AWS accounts
• Supported scalable growth while managing a $7M+ annual cloud budget

DevOps & Cost Optimization

• Delivered automated CI/CD pipelines, reducing deployment time and operational overhead
• Standardized templates for Infrastructure-as-Code minimized complexity and boosted consistency
• Enabled granular cloud spend tracking with 140 payee accounts for precise chargebacks

Lessons Learned

• Early implementation of STIG-compliant AMIs and Infrastructure-as-Code templates ensured consistency and security across accounts
• Agile project management with phased assessments and stakeholder engagement ensured alignment and minimized disruption
• A multi-tier automation strategy allowed orchestration without introducing unnecessary tooling complexity

AWS Services Used