About the customer 

The customer for this project is a United States federal agency

Customer challenge 

This federal agency’s financial system was hosted in a legacy data center that faced challenges in maintaining and scaling the existing IT infrastructure. The legacy systems were becoming increasingly difficult to manage, leading to inefficiencies and higher operational costs for the customer. 

Partner solution

CGI was the ideal partner for this agency’s financial system migration to AWS due to its extensive experience with cloud migrations, demonstrated by over 60 successful data center migrations. Their expertise in automation and innovation, such as using cloud-native technologies and automated deployment scripts, significantly reduced migration time and cost. Additionally, CGI's strong focus on security and compliance ensured that all systems met stringent federal requirements. Their cost optimization strategies and comprehensive cloud management services further demonstrated their capability to deliver efficient and secure cloud solutions.

CGI worked with this agency to design a tailored cloud architecture for their financial system, following CGI’s Cloud Migration Framework and AWS Well-Architected Framework. CGI deployed core fundamental services such as:

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  • Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • Application Load Balancer (ALB)

The solution included a comprehensive discovery and analysis of existing systems to identify areas for optimization. Modernization and architecture changes were implemented to take full advantage of cloud features. Additionally, CGI re-architected the agency’s Disaster Recovery (DR) solution providing more robust disaster recovery capabilities while reducing the overall cloud footprint, which resulted in lower monthly cost while decreasing overall recovery times.

Other key AWS services to highlight in the solution include: 

  • Relational Database Service (RDS): Simplifies database management and reduced Database Administrator (DBA) efforts.
  • CloudWatch: Provides comprehensive monitoring and logging for better operational insights.
  • CloudTrail: Ensures compliance and enhanced security through detailed audit trails.
  • GuardDuty: Quickly implement threat detection and security monitoring for the cloud environment.
  • AWS Backups: Automated backup processes to ensure data protection and recovery.
  • Transit Gateway: Simplifies network management and connectivity to CGI’s managed services, which provides essential operational and security services to meet FLETC’s hosting requirements.

Result and benefits 

The migration of the agency’s financial system to AWS resulted in several improvements across architecture, cost, and security. By leveraging AWS economies of scale, CGI was able to assist this agency with decreasing its monthly cloud spend by approximately 75%.  AWS cloud native capabilities increased availability, scalability, and flexibility, allowing the agency to adapt to future technology needs. With the migration to AWS, this agency is well-positioned for their next phase to upgrade their application and re-architect to a containerized architecture. 

Added value for this federal agency: 

  • Increased availability through added fault tolerance using availability zones and added redundancy at the application and database tiers. 
  • Improved disaster recovery by leveraging AWS cloud native services resulting in a successful DR recovery exceeding Recovery Time Objective SLAs by 96%. 
  • Replatformed the agency’s Oracle Database to RDS. 
  • Leveraged CGI’s Managed Cloud Services to expand upon the AWS services to meet operational and security requirements based on NIST 800-53 Moderate controls for the agency based on the Shared Responsibility Model. 
  • Implemented the entire infrastructure as code for repeatable and quick deployment. 
  • Improved scalability and elasticity by leveraging EC2. 

About the Partner 

CGI is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions with extensive experience in the federal sector. They were one of the first large company to achieve FedRAMP certification for their CGI Public Sector Cloud. CGI also manages FedRAMP authorized SaaS offerings for their Momentum Financials Application, and Sunflower Asset Management Applications.  

CGI offers a full spectrum of Cloud Services including Managed Cloud Services, Cloud Security, Cloud Strategy, Assessment & Migration, and Consulting.

With a proven track record of successful cloud migrations, CGI is well-equipped to support federal agencies in their IT modernization efforts.