As federal agencies rapidly adopt multicloud strategies, Sev1Tech has partnered with federal and commercial customers through various stages of their cloud journey — further equipping them with the tools and experience to continue modernizing government.
“I believe this has positioned Sev1Tech to bring valuable insight and lessons learned to cloud adoption strategies, the cloud services landscape, the implementation and migration activity, the user experience and the supportability of customer multicloud solutions,” says Tara LeBlanc, senior vice president of Department of Homeland Security mission solutions for Sev1Tech.
Every organization is at a different level of maturity in its cloud journey and requires unique solutions, strategies and processes to reach the finish line while navigating an evolving tech landscape.
“Our job is to partner with the customer, identify those dependencies and present a strategy to securely achieve their agency-specific cloud initiatives,” LeBlanc says.
Sev1Tech hosts multicloud solutions and supports customer-owned multicloud solutions, which can be designed to deliver specific business requirements or applications and provide redundancy for mission applications.
“We leverage open-source and cloud-agnostic tools where possible to streamline implementation, security and policies,” LeBlanc adds.
Sev1Tech also provides hybrid on-premises and cloud solutions for its customers, including Federal Information Security Management Act High on-premise and GovCloud environments. Through corporate partnerships with cloud providers, the company’s workforce remains skilled and ready to provide for evolving needs of current and future customers.
It’s these reasons that LeBlanc says distinguish Sev1Tech as an agency-level system integrator for cloud.
A Suite of Solutions
Considering the complexity of today’s cloud environments, Sev1Tech has positioned itself to offer a full suite of services ranging from automated migration readiness assessments to cloud migration and managed cloud services.
Along with ensuring it has the skillset to deliver the right tools, Sev1Tech split its cloud services into five categories: cloud-ready, cloud transformation, security, cloud-native deployments and working at the edge.
“[Cloud ready] encapsulates the strategic needs for a client’s cloud posture,” LeBlanc says. “We utilize automated assessment tools, develop a strategy and design the architecture. These critical components set the right foundation for cloud adoption, enabling a secure, compliant and efficient environment to work from.”
Cloud transformation is where the rubber meets the road — it’s about execution. Here, Sev1Tech uses industry best practices, automation and defined templates to roll out and configure the secure environments its clients need to be cloud ready, while incorporating multicloud, visibility and self-service capability.
Because security is a focus throughout the process, Sev1Tech is constantly assessing zero trust requirements through its architectures and ensuring it meets all policy controls for user and role access.
“We are consistently monitoring the security landscape against our client requirements and ensuring that we’re keeping them in line with FISMA, HIPAA, ITAR, CMMC and others,” LeBlanc says.
Ensuring security also means starting with a cloud strategy that has a security strategy incorporated, to include components like identity and access management, zero trust architecture, trusted internet connection services, and secure cloud and endpoint connectivity and solutions.
With hybrid multicloud solutions, it’s about having a solution to replicate security controls and logging uniformly across environments. There must be a process and governance around the evaluation of any new connections or application programming interfaces to the enterprise for potential risk or exposure.
Through cloud-native deployments, Sev1Tech is looking to use the most effective tools that can also provide value at the lowest cost, while adhering to DevSecOps approaches to promote security and efficiency. Working at the edge means using its networking team to build out solutions that leverage edge computing capabilities, therefore “helping clients extend the cloud to meet mission where it’s occurring,” LeBlanc says.
The cloud story isn’t just virtual machines and storage; it is also a redefining of business process, reimagining security and reducing complexity. LeBlanc says Sev1Tech walks right alongside its clients from start to finish. No matter where they are in their cloud journey, Sev1Tech has the right services and solutions with the right people to harness the power of the cloud to meet their mission.
Ironing Out Today’s Cloud Adoption Kinks
Because agencies are at different levels in their cloud journey, approaching cloud adoption in stages is critical to success, considering LeBlanc says customers are largely challenged with navigating agency-level cloud goals and dynamic security mandates while delivering cloud capabilities where governance and policies have not evolved.
“Delays result in costs to support both legacy and cloud environments and if, for example, security or change management teams haven’t adjusted to support DevOps/DevSecOps, if onboarding is too rigid and lengthy, costly delays may be experienced,” LeBlanc says.
Sev1Tech strives to help customers address this challenge by ensuring its team understands what the impacts on delivery are, communicates with them and works with the external teams to drive that agility.
Then, there’s the challenge when an agency adopts an “anything as a service” model where controls and support are often outsourced, which is a major shift for an organization. The ability to both define service performance and utilization requirements and enforce penalties to protect the government is vital.
Agencies must ask themselves a myriad of questions: Is there a structure in place to manage cloud utilization and associated costs effectively and accurately, or are the organization’s financial and reporting elements structured to support the forecasting and chargeback model to users?
Finally, the biggest challenge all of this is introducing change with the least impact on the mission. LeBlanc says instituting a cloud center of excellence that centralizes and manages cloud rollout and stakeholder communications, and provides governance and access to training and resources, is helpful to an organization looking to drive and manage an enterprise cloud services solution.
Ultimately, people and relationships are imperative to achieve mission success. When looking for the right cloud service provider or integrator to work through these challenges, agencies need not only the right tools, but the right cloud experts at the table.
LeBlanc says Sev1Tech invests in its people for that very reason.
“We also have developed relationships with the cloud service providers and others to stay ahead of the curve,” she says. “But none of that matters without knowing your customer and what’s required to meet their mission.”
Being knowledgeable of the customer’s requirements and challenges allows Sev1Tech to anticipate the cloud services that will provide the most benefit to the organization.
“As new services become available that can improve the operational landscape of cloud for our customers, we’re going to make sure that we’re aligning with the agency and talking through all possibilities,” LeBlanc says.
The Proof is in the Work
For one of Sev1Tech’s public sector customers, the company has integrated access to 13 public and private cloud solutions that support enterprise and mission-specific business requirements.
“In that scenario, we distinguished ourselves by focusing on solutions, collaborating with technology partners and customer stakeholders to identify and implement the solutions that best service the mission,” LeBlanc says.
Rather than operating with a short-term view, Sev1Tech considers all potential efficiencies — like security, interoperability, user experience and so on — and works with the customer stakeholders to realize them while mapping technologies to mission value.
“We evaluate the sustainability of the solutions and provide comprehensive artifacts and training to operations teams, whether they are our operations teams or external,” LeBlanc adds.
This falls within Sev1Tech’s mission of providing valuable consultancy into a customer’s strategic vision, and the engineering capability to implement and integrate sustainable solutions.
This approach also fosters a collaborative engagement while identifying and evaluating new technologies that deliver what customers need: enhanced security and performance.
The Future of Cloud
Cloud solutions are always changing, so Sev1Tech keeps a pulse on where the cloud service providers are going and how customers need to use the cloud.
For instance, a Defense Department program using data transport-as-a-service is being developed by Sev1Tech to provide a network delivery mechanism from space to air to land, in a multidomain environment. Sev1Tech also sees edge computing becoming more relevant as mission needs dictate, whether supporting the warfighter or disaster relief assistance. There are many other applications for edge technology from defense and civilian perspectives. The company also sees the introduction of artificial intelligence for IT operations into the fold as it starts to migrate from proof of concept and pilots into production.
Other areas LeBlanc is keeping a close eye on are managed security services; moving AI and machine learning to production; blockchain; the metaverse; and pushing the boundaries with virtual and augmented reality.
“Are we ahead of the curve when it comes to multicloud? I think being ahead of the curve is a constant effort to stay abreast of new technologies and the secure use of those technologies,” LeBlanc says. “Sev1Tech has a healthy technology partner ecosystem, and we constantly identify and evaluate new technology partners into that corporate ecosystem.”