Enterprise Cloud Application Migration

Enterprise Cloud Application Migration

Current Challenges & Risks:

Velocity & Throughput: Assessing and migrating hundreds of applications annually can result in a slow assessment and migration timeline, which hinders scalability of Government cloud offerings.

Customer Centricity: Government cloud onboarding is often unclear and manual, with a lack of transparency on the processes, roadmaps, and milestones.

Cybersecurity Inheritance: The ATO cycle often has unclear security requirements and inheritance models, which results in increased ATO and migration timelines.

Solution Overview:

Cloud Evolution and Streamlined Enhancement (Cloud-EASE) delivers an end-to-end cloud journey experience for Government cloud users embracing Human Centered Design (HCD) and product management principles to drive continuous iteration and improvement. We treat cloud services as products that deliver business, user, and stakeholder value as key indicators of success for cloud adoption.

Our solution employs customer centricity throughout the modernization and migration lifecycle. We embrace customer transparency by embracing self-service for onboarding, visibility into migration timelines, and insights into system owner cloud environments.

Current Challenges & Risks:

Velocity & Throughput: Assessing and migrating hundreds of applications annually can result in a slow assessment and migration timeline, which hinders scalability of Government cloud offerings.

Customer Centricity: Government cloud onboarding is often unclear and manual, with a lack of transparency on the processes, roadmaps, and milestones.

Cybersecurity Inheritance: The ATO cycle often has unclear security requirements and inheritance models, which results in increased ATO and migration timelines.

Solution Overview:

Cloud Evolution and Streamlined Enhancement (Cloud-EASE) delivers an end-to-end cloud journey experience for Government cloud users embracing Human Centered Design (HCD) and product management principles to drive continuous iteration and improvement. We treat cloud services as products that deliver business, user, and stakeholder value as key indicators of success for cloud adoption.

Our solution employs customer centricity throughout the modernization and migration lifecycle. We embrace customer transparency by embracing self-service for onboarding, visibility into migration timelines, and insights into system owner cloud environments.

Our Cloud-EASE Solution is Focused on Five Components to Deliver:

40% Faster ATO Approval
Reduced Migration Timeline by 20 Months
Enhanced Customer-Centricity & Transparency

Marketing & Outreach that enhances customer engagement through:

  • Streamlined Innovation
  • Cohesive Branding
  • Published Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  • Marketing Campaigns

Our Assessment Process leverages quantitative, qualitative, and software intelligence tool data, coupled with engineering judgment, to provide a holistic view of applications and portfolios of systems with a focus on standardizing migration patterns and cost optimization.

Standardized Onboarding applies a unified management Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portal for all customer intake, onboarding, and cloud migration lifecycle management.

Application Migrations leverage standard modernization and migration patterns (e.g.; Refactor, Re-platform, Rehost) as well as cybersecurity enablement and automation to deliver rapid receipt of a cloud ATO and an enablement/pairing model to support system owners in the management of their application post-migration.

Continuous Enhancement that invests in training and upskilling opportunities on the latest technologies:

  • Provides System Owners with Insights into the Operational Status of Their Application (i.e., application uptime, latency)
  • Delivers Financial Operations (FinOps) for Cost Optimization
  • Incorporates Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) for Advanced Application Cybersecurity Analysis – notably Deep Pack Inspection and Malware Infection

Our Cloud-EASE Solution is Focused on Five Components to Deliver:

40% Faster ATO Approval
Reduced Migration Timeline by 20 Months
Enhanced Customer-Centricity & Transparency

Marketing & Outreach that enhances customer engagement through:

  • Streamlined Innovation
  • Cohesive Branding
  • Published Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  • Marketing Campaigns

Our Assessment Process leverages quantitative, qualitative, and software intelligence tool data, coupled with engineering judgment, to provide a holistic view of applications and portfolios of systems with a focus on standardizing migration patterns and cost optimization.

Standardized Onboarding applies a unified management Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portal for all customer intake, onboarding, and cloud migration lifecycle management.

Application Migrations leverage standard modernization and migration patterns (e.g.; Refactor, Re-platform, Rehost) as well as cybersecurity enablement and automation to deliver rapid receipt of a cloud ATO and an enablement/pairing model to support system owners in the management of their application post-migration.

Continuous Enhancement that invests in training and upskilling opportunities on the latest technologies:

  • Provides System Owners with Insights into the Operational Status of Their Application (i.e., application uptime, latency)
  • Delivers Financial Operations (FinOps) for Cost Optimization
  • Incorporates Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) for Advanced Application Cybersecurity Analysis – notably Deep Pack Inspection and Malware Infection

End-to-End Cloud Marketing, Intake, Assessment,
& Migration Delivery Process

Cloud-EASE incorporates a lean product mindset and embraces Customer Experience (CX) solutions. By delivering iterative improvements based on user feedback, we reduce risks and enhance value throughout the cloud lifecycle. Our qualitative and quantitative research informs a deep understanding of user personas, enabling systematic improvements across assessment, onboarding, migration, and enhancement phases.

Aligned with cloud native principles—scalability, resiliency, observability, automation, security, and future-proofing—we ensure interoperability and avoid early cloud lock-in. Our standardized end-to-end cloud migration process enhances transparency, consolidates access points, streamlines documentation, and provides insights into application performance and cybersecurity.

Marketing & Outreach

We unify knowledge into a single management portal, and provide a service catalog, SLAs, technical documentation, and self-service cost estimation. Through roadshows, we showcase success stories, engage champions, and promote early adoption. Emphasizing awareness, education, and the transformative benefits of cloud services ensures broader understanding and adoption of Government cloud offerings.

Application Assessment

To accelerate application assessment and migration, we conduct qualitative and quantitative assessments. We gather data on storage needs, security levels, and performance metrics, coupled with our deep engineering expertise. Our templatized application archetypes streamline migration activities by aligning to complexity and system owner mission needs, prioritizing scalability over niche use cases.

Intake & Onboarding

We streamline onboarding through robust CRM integration, We enhance CX with clear documentation, detailed service catalogs, and explicit onboarding requirements. This ensures smooth integration for new customers and improves communication with system owners by clarifying expectations and simplifying access to migration status and tasks.

Application Migration

We optimize migration by standardizing and reusing core components to reduce timelines, workloads, and costs. Leveraging cloud-native common services, and everything “as code,” we automate environment setup and integration. We incorporate automated unit testing, journey testing, security scanning, regression testing, and auditability, ensuring streamlined deployment and enhanced reusability of tools and processes to accelerate migrations.

Modernized Cybersecurity Practices

An ATO is essential for any application, and our approach ensures a transparent path to production by aligning with Zero Trust principles and Government standards. We prioritize PaaS over IaaS architectures, incorporating control validation scripts for configuration, integrity, and access management within CI/CD pipelines, boosting inheritance to 60-70 percent. Pre-configured environments and RMF-compliant infrastructure, server, and container images streamline application deployment. Our Application Security Validation Engineers (ASVEs) provide hands-on training and automate compliance, accelerating ATO timelines.

Day 2 Operations & Continuous Enhancement

Post-migration, we equip system owners for self-sustained operations with a Day 2 Operations playbook. We incorporate Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles for resiliency and scalability, supported by an Agile feature delivery backlog and roadmap. Our continuous enhancement approach emphasizes automation and process improvement to optimize migration and cybersecurity, increasing throughput over time.

Financial Operations (FinOps)

We incorporate FinOps principles from the FinOps Foundation to maximize value and efficiency in your cloud journey with FinOps—empowering teams to manage costs, optimize resources, and drive accountability across your cloud ecosystem. Achieve smarter cloud usage through financial discipline and operational excellence.

New Tech Insertion

To support scalability amid evolving technologies, we integrate innovative benchmark standards and best practices. Leveraging Generative AI (like MetroStar’s solution accelerator Horizon Hunt) streamlines documentation consumption and modernizes legacy code, accelerating migration timelines. Incorporating AI/ML model development also enhances cybersecurity and Zero Trust activities, enabling advanced anomaly detection, deep packet inspection, and risk analysis, strengthening the cloud environment’s security posture and technical edge.

Elevate Your Agency’s Efficiency with MetroStar

Request a complimentary cloud readiness assessment today to discover how our enterprise cloud migration solutions can streamline your operations.

Hannah Hunt

Distinguished Technical Fellow

Elevate Your Agency’s Efficiency with MetroStar

Request a complimentary cloud readiness assessment today to discover how our enterprise cloud migration solutions can streamline your operations.

Hannah Hunt
Distinguished Technical Fellow