By: Paul Klinker, Executive Director, Open Architectures

Today many Federal agencies, like organizations in the private sector, are undertaking cloud migration and modernization efforts concurrently. It makes sense. Cloud migration as part of an overall modernization effort can help agencies save money, drive efficiencies, expand capabilities and ultimately execute and deliver on their missions better than ever before.

At the same time, the way applications are built, deployed and secured is changing, too. A typical IT professional’s job is becoming broader and more dimensional. Newer technologies and approaches like DevSecOps, Kubernetes, service meshes and automated security and deployment pipelines all provide new and exciting capabilities. However, they also introduce new considerations, complexities and potential vulnerabilities – all of which organizations should take into account.

Paul Klinker - Headshot
Paul Klinker, Executive Director, Open Architectures

Amid this sea change, IT leaders must also give appropriate attention to things like vendor lock-in – where an organization becomes beholden to one cloud vendor and its costs and maintenance, to the exclusion of others that may come to market with competing features or offerings. Things like containerizing workflows and applications, ensuring you have the staff you need to maintain and operate your cloud environments, building security into every facet of the development process – these are all part of a major shift in how enterprise IT teams work and ultimately support the mission.

We know that customers have diverse and far-ranging needs. They may have legacy monolithic applications, a mix of containerized and non-containerized applications, microservice-based systems or other architectures. What we bring to the table – regardless of a customer’s environment or where they are on their cloud migration journey – is an approach that lets them take advantage of new and powerful tools quickly and easily. 

At ManTech, we’ve done a lot to help our customers accelerate their cloud migration and development efforts via open architectures, which allow organizations to ensure everything they develop is portable across cloud environments, or even on-premise ones. We have an infrastructure as code (IaC) offering, using DevSecOps, with repeatable processes that lets customers build and provision their architectures, even repeatedly build new environments to develop, test or run applications in a streamlined way. This automated on-demand environment provisioning enables our customers to become immediately productive while reducing deployment errors and security vulnerabilities.

Our LaunchRAMPTM offering is designed to give customers the tools they need to assess and understand their current systems, create a roadmap for a cloud-native environment and identify the tools needed to help them do that as quickly as possible. Our LaunchRAMP DevSecOps tool contains scripts and other automations that accelerate a customer’s ability to develop cloud-native applications or migrate to cloud environments. First, it shifts security left, enabling our customers to develop secure pipelines for scanning and securing containers.  Second, this open architecture approach means customers can integrate into a service mesh providing enhanced security and system visibility. Having a common way to manage and secure microservices gives customers control – enforced at an enterprise level so as not to hamper or impede development. Finally, we simplify deployment, focusing on making it easier for customers to use Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines and service mesh development in their environments.

All of these things accelerate time to development, benefit our customers with the choice and flexibility they need, save them money, drive efficiencies, reduce variability and increase performance.

 

To learn more about our cloud migration and native cloud development portfolio, visit: https://www.mantech.com/secure-mission-and-enterprise-it