Solves challenges, modernizes computing infrastructures

The cloud helps federal agencies work more efficiently, serve its customers smarter and faster, and streamline its IT footprint. However, no two agencies have the same starting point, technical requirements, or organizational needs.

Using a framework called Cloud Migration Edge™ (CME), SAIC is managing these agencies’ moves to (and operations in) private clouds or hybrid clouds that custom-blend government and commercial resources.

It’s a big undertaking to transform legacy infrastructure and applications. By following a prescriptive set of tools, processes, and IT best practices—built on years of collective federal cloud computing knowledge—we tailor a migration plan to a customer’s specific situation.

“CME is the compass for where our customers want to go in the cloud,” said Carsten Schmid, CME lead. “It underpins success.”

Inherently modernized, optimized

Because the framework is divided into five phases of services, we can take a migration from beginning to end or at any step in between, whether the work is for the entire digital enterprise or targeted slices of it.

With CME, federal agencies receive:

• Organized, efficient, and the least disruptive cloud adoption, based on rigorously determined migration logic, strategies, and tactics for dealing with all moving parts and business impacts.
   
• Optimized IT architecture. Hybrid clouds have carefully selected components from top commercial cloud technology and service providers due to our role as a cloud services integrator and broker.
   
• Security and regulatory compliance with their cloud environments. After we deconstruct the legacy system, we “bake in” a modern security architecture with the cloud deployment.
   
• Value with their investments, as budgetary pressures are a realistic part of the business case and evaluation criteria.
   
• Operational efficiencies with a new management and governance model, which leads to business agility.

Successful deployments

Federal organizations that have called on SAIC include:

• Naval Sea Systems Command, which turned its Mine Warfare and Environment Decision Aids Library into cloud-based apps.
   
• NASA and the State Department, which virtualized their servers.
   
• IRS, which migrated its data storage systems to its private cloud.
   
• USDA and the National Archives and Records Administration, which are administering long-term cloud migration roadmaps that we helped develop. 

Although every migration effort is unique, one end-goal is common: operational and business transformation.

Not only does CME account for technical considerations, SAIC’s framework determines how to re-engineer business processes and organizational structures so that people drive the benefits of cloud computing.