This past Thanksgiving marked the first anniversary of going live with a SharePoint environment that AIS migrated from on-prem to Microsoft Azure IL5. Since then, our client has experienced 100% uptime during business hours and reduced deployment timelines, from weeks to minutes.

Challenge: Improve Performance, Speed Up Deployments

AIS set out to help a DoD agency that had experienced ongoing service issues with their existing provider while operating their on-prem SharePoint farm. During the year before the migration, the DoD customer experienced three service outages during business hours, which halted the ability to perform mission-critical activities. Additionally, their existing enterprise service provider required a lead-in time of 1-2 weeks to deploy any code changes or new capabilities into the environment. AIS was tasked with building a cloud solution to maximize uptime and accommodate rapid deployments to better serve the fast tempo required by our DoD customer.

Solution: Hybrid IaaS/Paas in Azure IL5

To provide a solution tailored to maximize uptime and accommodate rapid deployments, AIS architected a DoD first: a hybrid IaaS/PaaS environment in Azure Government IL5 that utilized the DISA Cloud Access Point to integrate with NIPRNet. We leveraged a suite of technologies to employ DevSecOps methodologies, allowing the solution to remain scalable while adhering to industry best practices. By implementing an automated code scanning solution, we reduced deployment lead-in time from weeks to minutes. Our infrastructure as code (IaC) development also drastically reduced the time required to build a new environment from several days to under one hour.

Looking Ahead: Cost-Sharing, Scale Across the DoD

AIS has worked with our DoD customers to offer these cloud services to neighboring agencies to benefit from cost-sharing. In doing so, we have passed on lessons learned and processes that we have developed to share our success across the DoD enterprise. As we grow, we continue to integrate evolving best practices to remain at the DoD DevSecOps initiative’s forefront.