Halfaker, an SAIC company, has a government client that provides high-quality IT infrastructure, software engineering, and system and database support services in support of its overall mission of providing high-quality financial services to customers. Delivering applications in cloud environments to improve government services using industry-leading technology and mission-focused design is critical to our client’s ability to remain responsive to new and evolving customer needs.

The challenge

More and more of our clients seek to provide IT services in a cloud-based environment, which requires a thorough assessment of IT solutions to determine migration suitability, scale, and strategy. To ramp up cloud modernization efforts, our client requires comprehensive infrastructure support, key performance upgrades, and multiple cloud engineering and migration initiatives to innovate service offerings and maximize efficiency as the customer base expands.

Our solution

Leveraging a robust IT service management (ITSM) framework, cloud engineering best practices, and mature DevOps processes, Halfaker delivers secure and reliable platforms, systems, networks and desktops and rapid and affordable cloud modernization using technology innovations like continuous integration and delivery automation to maximize our client’s revenue-earning and operational capability. We use core ITSM principles to provide comprehensive infrastructure support services to include system, database, and cloud network administration services that deliver key performance upgrades and platform migrations in alignment with our client’s cloud modernization goals. We perform cloud readiness assessments, provision/deprovision cloud resources, provide proactive connectivity monitoring, and deliver high-quality customer support to troubleshoot issues across the IT ecosystem.

To ensure continuous, high-quality cloud service delivery, our team established a DevOps pipeline that maximizes the use of automated commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tools/open source software (e.g. Jenkins, Ansible) and infrastructure as code (IaC) to rapidly build, test, and deploy cloud-hosted applications. We implement dynamic scaling, monitor cloud usage, and evaluate opportunities to optimize implementation and migration support. Our team continuously evaluates and recommends cloud-native services and tools, maintaining a cloud innovation backlog to include automated infrastructure builds and on-demand cloud instance pricing for virtual machines. For new cloud implementations and migrations, Halfaker’s cloud practitioners train end users and operations staff to understand available capabilities, enabling them to work effectively within the cloud environment. To further socialize cloud concepts, tools, and best practices, we are establishing a cloud center of excellence to support optimal implementations and migrations.

Realized benefits

Halfaker transformed the existing IT service delivery approach with an emphasis on service-centric process rigor and accelerated cloud migration. Our ITSM-aligned approach and established DevOps practices optimized technology and service delivery to provide:

• Future-enabled, customer-focused ecosystem
• Lower operational costs
• Improved infrastructure resilience

Halfaker’s scalable enterprise cloud management and migration support enables our clients to more rapidly meet evolving customer need while delivering significant cost savings, high system availability, and improved security. Halfaker configures, maintains, and optimizes infrastructure hardware, software, and communication links to include 172 servers, 64 third-party software products, and 160 in-house developed applications and reporting systems comprised of custom code and COTS software.