Agency Boosts Efficiency with Automation and AWS Cloud

Challenge

A US cabinet-level federal agency wanted to improve users’ ability to search, review, and respond to documents and data within its financial assistance systems. It also needed a service platform to support shared mission needs between itself and other agencies. To achieve these goals, it required support from professionals with extensive software development, cloud computing, and product and program management experience, as well as an understanding of the federal agency's specific technology and mission needs.

The agency’s system houses millions of documents and 60+ TB of data and serves multiple agencies. The previous solution utilized file transfer protocol (FTP) servers and documents stored in siloed, legacy databases, which presented the following challenges:

• Older technology interfered with the process of maintaining legacy applications, creating technical debt and prevented adoption of new technologies, such as serverless architecture and microservices
• Operators had to take time away from higher-level tasks to manually change configurations
• Users experienced performance issues, such as slow download speeds and limited search functionality

To better manage documents, leverage modern technologies, and efficiently improve its services to the public, the agency sought to move its operations to the cloud and apply process automation.

Solution

Guidehouse has partnered with this agency for over 15 years, applying leading technologies and processes such as user-centered design, cloud modernization, business analytics, and artificial intelligence to improve the user experience, increase efficiencies, and strengthen service delivery.

For this project, Guidehouse helped the agency modernize its solution platform and enhance service delivery, by developing a high-performance team with the advanced technology skillsets needed to provide the organization with the necessary modernization capabilities. The team moved operations to the AWS cloud, so the services could be fully hosted and secured in a FedRAMP-certified cloud environment, accessed by over 200,000 users around the world, serving 10 agencies with 60 terabytes of data.

The solution included the use of artificial intelligence (AI)- and machine learning (ML) -powered features to convert images to machine-readable PDF format, and helped clients answer questions and retrieve documents. Guidehouse also improved system security through use of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliance framework, encrypted data via the AWS certificate manager, hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), transport layer security, and AWS Key Management Service for encryption at rest.

To achieve these outcomes, Guidehouse collaborated with stakeholders to modernize the system with AWS services, such as S3, which includes a search function and storage component, Simple Queue Service (SQS), which is used to convert documents to the appropriate format and asynchronously process files, and Lambda, which is a serverless compute resource to trigger document processing. This modernized architecture leverages microservices, restful application programming interfaces, and containerized solutions to create reusable services.

The team utilized Agile methodologies (SAFe®) to execute the modernization activities, which accelerated feature-drive releases.

Additionally, the team built robust DevSecOps-driven continuous integration and deployment pipelines and policy-driven security enforcement. Using AWS Auto Scaling, which enables the spawning of separate computers to process loads from the queue, the team created 10 cloud-based subsystems. This action resulted in a 50% reduction over a seven-year period in transaction processing times and full compliance with federal policy requirements.

Further, Guidehouse applied machine learning (ML) technologies, including AWS Sagemaker, to analyze large datasets, detect patterns, and predict outcomes to inform agencies in their decision processes. The team built several business intelligence dashboards and reports to support the agency’s mission.

Impact

Guidehouse collaborated with the agency to solve its complex modernization and cloud migration challenges. The Guidehouse and AWS partnership helped the agency reduce costs, improve return on investment, and remain focused on mission objectives.

Migrating from the legacy database to AWS cloud services reduced costs related to storage, back-ups, database size, CPU, and licensing fees.

The team achieved 99.97% uptime by implementing infrastructure as code, serverless, and containers, to minimize disruption, downtime, and efficient rollback in the unlikely event of a critical failure. The solution also improved reliability through autoscaling and load balancing, which can be deployed within minutes in real time without impacting users.

The modernized solution also expanded functionality, and increased the agency’s ability to test new solutions that further developed their financial assistance system. The user experience was improved with enhancements to the interface and simplifying file retrieval based on expanded tagging.

The migration serves as a foundation for additional processes and improvements using the tools and technology available on AWS. Additionally, the organization has achieved its vision to better manage documents and data and efficiently improve its services to the public.