CLOUD MIGRATION POWERS HHS OIG EFFICIENCY LEAPS

LOW EFFICIENCY AND HIGH COST OF OPERATION – Systemic, technical deficiencies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General’s business applications development practices and on prem infrastructure required tedious manual activities that lengthened the time to delivery.

SECURITY VULNERABILITIES – Public-facing portals had security vulnerabilities and upload restrictions due to obsolete email submission mechanisms involving manual selection and filtering.

ATO PROCESS RISKS – The size and complexity of the organization’s System Security Plan (SSP) led to delays in the Authority to Operate (ATO) process and increased security risks for the OIG.

The HHS OIG needed not only modernized technical infrastructure but also new processes and approaches that could
leverage the efficiencies built into the new tech.

DMI was at the forefront of OIG’s transition to Agile development practices that improved efficiency and cut costs. DMI
implemented development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) practices that drastically reduced the Time To Delivery (TTD) and make deployments repeatable. This included the design, implementation, documentation, and delivery of a fully-automated
Hybrid-Cloud General Support System (GSS) that was utilized to move OIG assets and capabilities to the cloud securely and reliably.
DMI also implemented two end-to-end automation pipelines for the CI/CD process (one for the legacy systems and another for the modern systems) and developed numerous cloud-specific systems and capabilities to directly support the OIG’s business needs.

The new architecture optimizes the application migration capability-as-a-service that is offered by AWS using AWS’s Application Migration Service (AMS) and Database Migration Service (DMS). The HHS OIG migration leveraged these two services to move on-prem infrastructure to the cloud. When the AMS agent began analyzing and discovering applications, it provided a dependencies list to be resolved before the migration process began (see diagram below). Both services (AMS and DMS) deploy AWS resources in two different availability zones and create read and write replicas for databases.

Now that HHS OIG’s critical application stack is operating in the AWS Cloud, the agency is ready to take advantage of all the powerful and emerging technologies available to government entities – including IoT, Data Analytics, AI and Automation.

The organization is also equipped to quickly deliver business
solutions and products that advance its mission in a cost-effective,
efficient way – all on an IT foundation built for a new era of growth