AWS Cloud Solutions

The Federal Government requires a company with experience successfully executing mission critical solutions. Credence's strategy balances next generation technology with government mandated compliance and strict Department of Defense (DoD) regulations. Credence has gained a reputation in the Federal Government and partner eco-system by serving as a thought leader, making government systems more secure, efficient, and reliable.

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is a combat support agency with over 26,000 civilian and military personnel around the world. Located in 48 states and 28 countries, DLA provides supplies to the military services and supports their acquisition of weapons, fuel, repair parts, and other materials. The agency also disposes of excess or unusable equipment through various programs.

Recently, DLA released a solicitation to migrate FedMall system and applications to the cloud, including a request to minimize downtime and continuously improve the workload infrastructure over time. FedMall is an eCommerce sytem used by customers including Federal, DoD, and authorized state and local agencies as well as Foreign Military Sales (FMS) bodies. The system brings customers who need commercial, military products & services, and DoD-approved suppliers together in an efficient electronic marketplace. FedMall users have access to more than 53 million individual items of supply, from centrally managed DoD and Government Services Administration (GSA) assets to commercial products. The system supports more than 54,000 active users and 900 suppliers, and processes roughly 1.5 million transactions, amounting to more than $325 million in sales. 

DLA faced challenges that prevented FedMall from running at its optimal level. The FedMall system was originally built with IBM technologies and used IBM DB2 as the underlying database. Specific components included: IBM WebSphere Commerce (runs FedMall front end shopping environment and custom applications), IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) (Manages supplier, user, and program data for FedMall), IBM Integration Bus (IIB) (ties all the IBM product together), IBM Portal (runs the environment for suppliers to register, upload and manage catalogs, and view purchase orders), and FedMall Custom Utilities. FedMall is virtualized on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system to meet current and future system needs. The system includes three tiers: application, database, and a web DMZ of servers clustered behind load balancers, with approximately 60 production servers. All operating environments were located in a commercial data center and Credence migrated them over to Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud enclave.

Credence is an Advanced Tier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), specializing in managing services in the AWS GovCloud (US). AWS GovCloud is designed to host sensitive data, regulate workloads, and address the most stringent US government security and compliance requirements. AWS GovCloud (US) enables customers to adhere to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements, Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), DoD (SRG) Impact Levels 2 and 4 and 5, and several other security and compliance requirements. AWS provides customers with the broadest and deepest cloud platform. AWS has more services and more capabilities within each service than any other Cloud Service Provider (CSP). With AWS, customers can get the right tools for the job they want to get done. Companies and organizations are looking to become more agile so they can innovate and respond to change faster, including providing the government support with mission-critical workloads. Applications now need to scale quickly to potentially millions of users, have global availability, manage petabytes if not exabytes of data, and respond in milliseconds.

Credence won this contract because of our ability to clearly illustrate a plan to modernize FedMall towards a cloud-based modern architecture over a reasonable timeline and reasonable price.

Credence built a managed enclave in AWS GovCloud (US) environment by following DoD’s Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC-SRG). We created a landing zone and associated guard rails to ensure perimeter security and connection to the to DISN/NIPRnet. We used modern techniques to migrate the application virtual machines, data, and configuration to ensure zero or minimal downtime of the application. As requested by DLA, we ensured that the migration of FedMall to the cloud environment is transparent to end-users so they can support the warfighter with uninterrupted access to FedMall.

The migration of FedMall to AWS GovCloud has resulted in better performance of the application, improved system uptime, and infrastructure transparency to the Program Office. Because of these improvements, the Credence Team is also able to respond to the needs of the application development team in an agile manner and provide desired infrastructure utilization metrics to DLA. Further, Credence successfully lowered the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the FedMall application and paved the way for future modernization opportunities.  

Credence focuses on achieving greater agility and innovation in order to accomplish their customer’s business goals. Credence provides innovative, high-end management, engineering, and IT solutions to a variety of US Federal Government departments and agencies, delivering results efficiently and cost effectively. We act in an independent and objective capacity to support the mission and goals of each customer, providing solutions from large-scale business transformation to warfighter capabilities enhancement to enterprise-wide IT modernization. With a wide footprint across the Federal government, our areas of expertise span the following domain areas: Program Management, IT, Cyber and Security, Engineering, Scientific, Logistics, Financial, and Human Capital. Credence continues to focus on excellence and proven technology leaders which has won them awards such as GovCon Award, Washington Technology Fast 50 Award and multiple Inc. 500/5000 Awards.