Challenge

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) has a requirement to meet the 2013 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). This initiative required the Agricultural Research Services (ARS) applications to be moved to a consolidated data center or cloud service provider. The environment was located on premise and was at risk due to circuit, power and equipment failures. As a result, the desired state of the ARS servers and applications was to be housed off premise in the Azure Government Cloud.

Solution

TechTrend was awarded a contract to migrate and manage Azure Cloud services for ARS. TechTrend services include hosting of multiple environments on both Azure Government and Azure Commercial Clouds. The Azure Platform is the only technology positioned as a leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Application Platform as a Service, and Cloud Storage Services.

For the ARS development environment, TechTrend provided architectural design services to replicate and migrate existing development environment into the Azure Government cloud. We leveraged Azure Site Recovery to create an environment snapshot and lift and virtualize the existing environment into the cloud. TechTrend also provided advisory support services to roadmap the modernization of legacy Oracle systems to 12C while maintaining legacy application support in the Azure Cloud.

Lastly, TechTrend developed robust business intelligence and cloud utilization portals to enable real-time monitoring and performance evaluation of the provided Azure cloud environments. This management tool and portal currently allows authorized users to spin up and scale down their deployed environment at will to provide unparalleled cost efficiency and on-demand performance.

Results

TechTrend successfully migrated and currently manages Azure Government Cloud for the ARIS production and test environments. The improved environment offers physical and network isolation from non-U.S. government deployments and requires specialized personnel screening. TechTrend’s cloud offering also addresses the USDA’s regulatory and compliance requirements such as FedRAMP, FISMA, ITAR, CJIS, HIPAA and DoD Impact Levels 1-5.