SAIC Teams with AWS to Streamline Air Force's Cloud Costs

Innovative approach to firewalls realizes 80% cost savings

 

Cloud One is the trusted cloud computing platform for the Department of Defense. As the one-stop-shop for DOD mission application (MA) owners to acquire cloud services, the program delivers speed, scale, and security. SAIC serves as the Air Force’s prime industry partner on the program and is constantly working with the DOD and cloud service providers to deliver more mission capability on the program.

Recently, through its continued effort to provide secure and reliable environments to the DOD, Cloud One has implemented an Egress Services Transit Gateway (ESTG) to centralize Barracuda CloudGen firewall deployment. An egress firewall prevents software within a secure cloud environment from reaching outside the cloud for data without oversight.

Challenge

Previously, MAs were required to deploy Barracuda CloudGen firewalls in each MA account and on each instance of the MA, which led to higher costs. To combat this issue and help lower costs, AWS has introduced the ESTG, which is a centrally managed cloud routing solution that allows virtual traffic routing and forwarding. It’s a bit like building a single secured exit for a house rather than multiple exits for every room.

Solution

Partnering with AWS, we are able to bring the power of industry collaboration to benefit DOD missions in the cloud. "We are excited for this gain for the customer and anxious to explore more innovations in the near future as Cloud One defines what best-in-class looks like," said Fazal Mohammed, SAIC solutions architect director.

Ultimately, the ESTG allows the removal of hundreds of Barracuda CloudGen firewalls from the MA DMZs (a cloud DMZ limits access between on-premises and virtual networks) and consolidates them to a single-egress-service virtual private cloud (VPC). In the single VPC, a much smaller number of Barracuda CloudGen firewalls is centrally managed in a high-availability configuration, cutting overall costs by over 80%.

For more information on Cloud One, visit https://info.cloudone.af.mil/#/.