Improving materiel and resource readiness for the Army’s global land force through cloud migration

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When the U.S. Army gets the order to move forces to trouble spots or for training, it takes with it the power of the Army Materiel Command (AMC). The AMC delivers logistics, sustainment and materiel readiness from the installation to the forward tactical edge to ensure globally dominant land force capabilities. The Army’s primary command is one of its largest with more than 175,000 military, civilian and contractor employees, impacting all 50 states and more than 150 countries. All the equipment, spare parts and supplies get procured through AMC’s Logistics Modernization Program (LMP) to ensure that troops have what they need for the mission at hand.

Powered by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the LMP encompasses the entire supply chain of manufacturing, acquisition and shipping. More than 23,000 users access the LMP and conduct over nine million transactions daily. In addition to procurement, embedded workflows include maintenance, repair, overhaul and the retirement of warfighting equipment. Materiel readiness as well as asset management and accountability, architecture and acquisition compliance drive these critical activities for our nation.

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Services provided

  • Project management and partner collaboration
  • AWS Cloud knowledge and certifications
  • Project service desk support
  • Continuous Tier 1 and Tier 1.5 support for production applications, interfaces, databases and servers

Success achieved

  • 50 operational locations with support for specific needs
  • 40+ Army databases and 50+applications migrated
  • Foundational cybersecurity including automation that eliminated manual review of vulnerabilities

Providing modern capabilities for mission readiness

Challenge

The LMP runs every hour of every day, just as it has since 2003. Monumental amounts of technology, including back-up programs and security, keep the system and the workflows operational.

With multiple locations, the LMP was susceptible to higher risk. Leaders were keenly aware of the cyber, terrorist and other threats around the world that would affect a program of this scale. The Army’s plan to migrate the LMP to a cloud environment would not only strengthen system security, it would reduce costs, increase vendor collaboration, modernize the infrastructure, streamline processes and provide better system access to data.

The Army needed zero downtime during the migration, so it needed the right parter that understood the gravity of the mission and had the technical capability to execute the migration.

Approach

Maximus, as a trusted partner of the Army since 2014, brought an essential level of credibility to the migration. This included extensive experience with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud engineering, design and operations along with the FedRAMP offerings the Army preferred. Maximus had a deep talent pool with more than 100 AWS certifications and a proven history of consolidating numerous databases, application development environments, and digital modernization tactics that adhere to rigorous security standards.

Alongside its partners, Maximus got to work with its cloud migration methodology that included:

  1. Core program management strategy, structure and expertise
  2. Application and trading partner interface migration
  3. Export of LMP data from on-premise servers at the Defense Information Systems Agency
  4. Creation of new databases using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  5. Conversion of all existing monitoring, reporting, and auditing jobs to AWS
  6. Process review and streamlining
  7. Availability of legacy systems during cloud migration transition period
  8. Extensive testing to ensure data accuracy after migration

Results

The migration covered 40+ databases, 20+ database-related servers, and 50+ applications, as well as multiple portal, development and production servers. All 50 LMP locations retained their level of activity, and the efficiency increase was notable. Maximus also developed an automated notification and escalation process to quickly handle issues that surfaced, and a dedicated service desk to help stakeholders work through individual problems.

Maximus continues to enhance the Army’s LMP capabilities with shared knowledge of ERP technology, cloud computing, artificial intelligence expertise as well as command, control and communication capabilities. Today, the LMP provides modern capabilities so the Army can launch and sustain any operation upon request for mission readiness. It is more secure and more accessible, enabling data to be managed and maintained significantly faster.

We can empower you to innovate with agility and scale, delivering impactful outcomes and exceptional customer experiences.

Learn more at maximus.com/defense.