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Summary

This work supports SAIC’s Prime contract with the Department of Interior for the Foundational Cloud Hosting Solutions 2. The Department of the Interior began the initial FCHS contract ten years ago to launch the cloud adoption movement. The Department offered government-wide assisted acquisition services to foster agency enterprise environments. Cloud migrations grew by 50% annually and today’s FCHS landscape supports several multi-agency environments. Since 2013, the Department has provided assisted acquisition services by technical service lines to federal agencies by the Government Management and Reform Act (GMRA) of 1994. The Department has been managing these services aligned with the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy. The FCHS2 next-generation requirements are similar and require expertise in cloud services based on the requirements and objectives below.

Problem and Solution

Over time the Department and other Agencies cloud computing has increased Cloud Service Offerings (CSO) exponentially. Over the last decade cloud adoption has increased remarkably and over the last couple of years has exploded as work went virtual and agencies adapted to remote work. Ever more present is the need to connect current CSOs with autonomous Internet of things (IoT) infrastructure and access ultra-fast networks and augmented or virtual reality devices. Behind the expanding cloud smart adoption is a paralleled initiative to replace legacy and local area network applications with virtual enterprise solutions to consolidate, optimize, and close physical data centers. Going forward, the biggest CSO increase will be in the emerging FedRAMP SaaS and Government community collaboration opportunities that meet an increasing driver of sustainability in cloud innovation. 

Solutions

SAIC requires support to assist the Department in reducing the gap of current cloud adoption barriers. DOI identified two leading constraints that challenge a larger scale of cloud adoption and migration. Xentity provided application and data management services. They implemented basic data management best practices for all hosted systems, including data dictionaries, discovery metadata, and open web services. Also, we supported requirements to manage and modernize Department data integration through emerging architectures such as data mesh, how they support interoperability through semantic technologies, and how they include data management strategies such as data mesh, metadata management strategies data to remain Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).

Xentity also worked to establish cloud service catalogs. This accomplishes the following:

  • Improve agility while managing the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and performance of computing and storage services;
  • Communicate electronically approved offerings and catalogs to the farthest reaches of the Department.
  • Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (“TCO”) of delivering shared IT services
  • Promote the use of Green IT, such as offering pre-built accelerators or embedded carbon emissions automated calculators and conversions dashboards. 
  • Ensure all applicable federal mandates for information security and privacy regulations are maintained and adhered to
  • Provide tiered functions, service levels, and performance for customers
  • Provide interoperable and portable solutions that enable mobility across hosting models and service providers
  • Enable scaling of infrastructure and application resources to meet elastic application and user demands.

Outcome and Benefit

Migrating from on-premises infrastructures to the cloud will improve the ability to react to failures while maintaining functionality. It will increase disaster recovery options such as initiating multiples of geo-replications or performing load balancing. Also, it will manage a broader range of virtual environment computing services throughout the IT systems life cycle and well before obsolescence. In doing so, Xentity has replaced legacy and local area network applications with virtual enterprise solutions to consolidate, optimize, and close physical data centers.