Booz Allen Cloud Solutions

Cloud, scaled for the enterprise, resilient for the mission

Over the course of the past decade, cloud has become a foundational pillar of digital transformation across all industries. The cloud has liberated organizations from expensive legacy software licenses and hardware, reduced the time from capability ideation to delivery, provided scale to accommodate unprecedented levels of traffic, and facilitated the contemporary age of artificial intelligence and data-driven insights.

Having been at the forefront of cloud adoption for more than a decade, Booz Allen has the end-to-end, experience-based knowledge to guide clients through every step of their cloud journey. We have built, and continue to operate, some of the largest, most mission-critical cloud platforms in the federal government, and have successfully guided hundreds of cloud migrations, modernizations, and cloud-native development projects, leveraging both traditionally networked and edge cloud solutions.

Booz Allen SmartCloud: An Integrated Framework of Solutions

Booz Allen SmartCloud is a platform of integrated, yet modular offerings that ease and optimize the end-to-end cloud journey. SmartCloud solutions are built upon proven accelerators, tooling, and automated patterns that reduce friction to reach cloud goals. This framework harnesses the power of our collective lessons learned in over a decade of delivery, and is informed by our differentiated, credentialed partnerships with industry-leading cloud service providers (CSP) and emerging cloud enablers.

We recognize that while certain cloud journey landmarks are common to all clients, each individual cloud journey is unique. For this reason, clients can adopt SmartCloud as an end-to-end solution, or select from its individual components based on their posture and needs. By providing a structured series of entry points into this repeatable framework, we can meet clients where they are—from bringing automation to a client’s initial application rationalization effort to accelerating the path to platform ATO and beyond.

Cloud Journey and Booz Allen SmartCloud Offerings
smart lift

SMARTLIFT

Rationalization and Migration Strategy

Provides end-to-end application rationalization, migration roadmap, and progress tracking using mission insights, code scanning, automation accelerators, and open architectures.

smart platform

SMARTPLATFORM

As-A-Service

Provides cloud-based, as-a-service platforms that enable specialized, purpose-driven mission solutions. This can include cybersecurity threat hunting and detection, machine learning operations (AIOps and MLOps), and extended reality/augmented reality (XR/VR), and more.

smart assist

SMARTASSIST

Resell, Managed Services and Hosted Environments

Provides clients an “easy button” to access cloud-native capabilities via differentiated reseller agreements with leading cloud and technology vendors, “outcome as a service” models, and hosted solutioning environments for highly regulated missions.

smart dimensions

SMARTDIMENSIONS

Operationalizing Cloud Native, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

Provides telemetry and a “single pane of glass” view for platform health, application health, security compliance, and cloud financials (FinOps) across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

smart defense

SMARTDEFENSE

Virtual Cloud Defense

Provides comprehensive blueprints for integrated cybersecurity services and capabilities for system protection, access control, monitoring, and compliance with the latest industry cloud security standards and zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles.

smart edge

SMARTEDGE

Edge Cloud Computing and Tactical Cloud

Provides distributed compute across singular or meshed devices enabling information reasoning and decentralized capability delivery at the tactical edge. Mission owners access powerful artificial intelligence (AI) computing capabilities, with the ability to harness and share real-time, critical intelligence no matter the mission environment or network connectivity.

smart factory

SMARTFACTORY

Repeatable, Scalable, Development Accelerators

Provides cloud-native, container-based DevSecOps solutions and software factory configuration on Day One to accelerate capability delivery. Leverages proven, accredited patterns from production scale implementations, including those used for the Air Force’s Platform One offering.

BY THE NUMBERS

3000+

Certified cloud architects and engineers across CSPs

1000+

Application migrations managed

20+

Corporate certifications to include AI, DevSecOps, Security, Migration, and more.

“Done with purpose, cloud can pave the way for tighter security, more efficient operations, seamless integration of new technologies, and agile footing across an enterprise. Done haphazardly, it can leave agencies with a new set of challenges that are just as formidable as those they experienced with on-premises IT.”

Common Questions

Cloud has become a foundational, yet transformational technology. Yet, as it continues to mature and scale, complexity grows, setting off an explosion of new decisions, questions, and challenges that organizations must address in order to realize the advantage of the cloud. Our clients come to us with their most pressing questions, whether they are just getting started in the cloud, or are ready to mature, scale, and innovate.

What is the time and cost required to move our operations to the cloud, and how can we enable transparency?

No two cloud migrations are alike. As scope, scale, and complexity vary from one migration to another, so do costs and timelines. Which workloads and applications need to be migrated? How much development and customization are required? These factors and others, such as tooling choices and workforce readiness, all have an impact on time and expense.

 

Booz Allen assists clients with planning out and prioritizing their cloud projects based on their needs and budget. We take a multifaceted approach in technology and process to strengthen transparency, increase automation, and provide awareness throughout the cloud journey.

 

Through research, interviews, testing, and decades of experience in the federal technology space, we developed our SmartLift decision framework to bring a deep understanding of our clients’ needs that helps keep expectations clear and aligned. We maintain a constant line of communication around priorities and shifts in business needs throughout the migration process, with efforts that include regular check-ins, garnering of executive buy-in, and many rounds of user acceptance testing.

Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Migration, Cloud Native Development. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartLift, SmartPlatforms, SmartAssist
How can we expedite our migration?

 

Sometimes cloud migrations are born from short-term mandates (e.g., an immediate need to move quickly out of a data center). But, while there can be benefits to speed, we often see clients lift and shift much of their technical debt to their new environment, leading to sustainability issues later on. Balancing the right approach can enable speed and scale throughout the full cloud lifecycle. Booz Allen is trusted to migrate, deploy, and manage the nation’s critical mission systems around the clock, ensuring that migration decisions are transparent, data driven, and designed for sustainability over time.

 

Booz Allen SmartCloud offerings, and SmartLift in particular, provide technology accelerators and migration plan assistance tailored for clients to fit their requirements and constraints. SmartLift™ answers the when, what, and how of cloud migration. Based on more than 1,000 large-scale cloud migrations, we’ve curated reusable tools and practices that automate significant aspects of deployment. Built with Booz Allen’s trusted and data-driven decision framework from Bento, and integrated with CAST Highlight, SmartLift™ accelerates the migration process with a comprehensive scan for cloud readiness so enterprises can prioritize, sequence, and address risks before moving complex infrastructures to cloud-native environments. Combining deep cloud architecture expertise and best practices from years of client experience, SmartLift™ streamlines historically manual and inconsistent processes, to result in:

  • Up to 75% reduction in application portfolio assessment time
  • 40% reduction in annual hosting costs
  • Reduction of months to days by eliminating manual code reviews, validation, and data collection

Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Migration, Cloud Native Development. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartLift, Developer Portal, SmartAssist, SmartPlatforms

Learn more about SmartLift

Learn more about our SmartCloud approach to Migration

How can we ensure continuity of operations during migration?

Cloud migration of any workload can be a disruptive exercise. After all, mission operations can’t be suspended while your application is being moved to a cloud-based infrastructure. Multiplied across a complex enterprise with hundreds or thousands of workloads, migration must be smart and precise, with readiness assessed from the code level to the workforce itself. This is why Booz Allen SmartCloud offerings prioritize minimizing disruption to current workflows in moving any applications and operations into the cloud.

 

Built by Booz Allen and integrated with CAST Highlight, SmartLift™ accelerates the migration process with a comprehensive and automated analysis for cloud readiness so enterprises can prioritize, sequence, and address risks before moving complex infrastructures to a multitude of cloud-native environments. For a fully integrated migration solution, we’ve embedded our trusted, data-driven framework from Bento so organizations can access modeling, business variables, code analysis, budget estimates, and planning all in one dashboard. By choosing the right approach, migrations can be designed with minimization in mind.

 

This starts with choosing the right migration approach, minimizing the impact of necessary trade-offs and disruption considerations. Rehosting, redeployment, repackaging, refactoring, retiring, among others, each come with unique benefits. Sometimes, a "lift-and-shift" framework that prioritizes speed to launch by retaining core functionality before adding more complex and specialized tools and processes seems best. However, while minimizing initial disruptions, it is difficult to scale, and as needed complexity comes, so too does disruption. Refactoring or re-architecting an application at the outset to enable greater cloud-native features can improve performance and enable scale and may be worth the upfront efforts.

 

Regardless of the migration approach, we leverage proven, human-centric project management approaches to develop realistic, clearly communicated roadmaps, and agile methodology to plan, build, and carefully roll out incremental changes. In addition, related strategies that we employ to keep transitions as seamless as they are impactful include:

  • Parallel development: For short sprints, we test new development beside current processes to ensure a full understanding for all users.
  • Phased data and functionality migration: We migrate data, tools, and users in a deliberate fashion, employing change management to promote speedy, painless adoption of new processes, tools, and interfaces.
  • Canary Releases and Rollback Patterns: We maintain a persistent recovery plan that will restore all legacy data, access, environmental configuration, and functions should any dimension of the migration not meet expectations.
  • Focus groups: We use focus groups to test new tools and user adoption strategies to help get workforces up to speed as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Migration, Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Operations. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartLift SmartDimensions, SmartAssist

Learn more about SmartLift

Learn more about SmartCloud approach to Migration

Which of our currently on-premises applications should we prioritize moving to the cloud?

Business needs, requirements, data, and timeline expectations are some of the many determiners of which applications should be prioritized for migration. Booz Allen’s SmartLift framework helps clients make this decision by weighing a range of key features, including:

  • Enabling Scalability: We encourage clients to prioritize apps with high growth potential, as the cloud empowers rapid scaling in response to increased demand. 
  • Focusing on Cost: The capital expenditures associated with hosting applications on-premises—hardware, manual processing, and regular upgrades—add up over time. We help clients flag apps that drive an outsized share of such expenditures for prioritized migration to the cloud, where services are bought and paid for only as needed.
  • Encouraging Flexibility: Applications that are newer, growing, or overdue for a transformative upgrade do well in the cloud, where it’s relatively easy to create proofs of concept to test and iteratively improve upon. We assist clients in identifying such apps for prioritization.
  • Addressing Code Analysis: Assessing application health by categorizing cloud readiness, security risks, code quality, and infrastructure scans to help provide insight into prioritization.
  • Considering Data Upfront: Federal agencies must pay close attention to data in cloud migration efforts. The sensitivity and size of data, as well as the number of potential data integrations required for a migration, can and should inform the overarching strategy and roadmap.
Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Migration, Cloud Native Development, Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Operations. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartLift, SmartAssist

Learn more about SmartLift

Learn more about our SmartCloud approach to Migration

Should I move my apps to a CSP or a software as a service (SaaS) provider?

For years, CSPs such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud were the primary landing zone choices for public sector, mission-critical workloads, but low code/no code (LCNC) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools have expanded the menu as they have recently matured their capabilities and attained the accreditation to host more sensitive data. Our SmartCloud offering can help our clients understand the benefits and constraints of their various options and choose what’s right for them.

CSPs

Advantages of CSPs include inherent flexibility, mobility, and scalability for custom-built applications, and tailored patterns of data recovery and available zones of accessibility. Most also offer tools and services that fit together right out of the box, layers of security and provisioning for precise user-access control, and, similarly to SaaS, managed services without vendor lock-in.

 

Challenges associated with CSPs include a slightly larger risk of performance issues or outages if failover patterns are not configured properly, an ongoing need for continuous upskilling for developers and engineers to maintain a high-quality environment, and a longer, more difficult migration and build. There are also some instances where a task that would require multiple CSPs can be addressed with a single SaaS solution.

SaaS Alternatives:

One advantage of SaaS and some LCNC offerings is that the provider takes responsibility for maintaining servers, databases, and software. This is easier to scale and, at times, secure, which can help expedite delivery time. With the provider taking on so much of the heavy lifting, these alternative options mean that clients face less pressure to continuously upskill their workforces.

 

But these advantages must be balanced against higher licensing costs, contracts that can create vendor lock-in, less autonomy over security and scalability, and less ability to customize for specialized business needs.

Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Migration, Cloud Native Development. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartLift, SmartPlatforms, SmartAssist
We struggle to maintain our cloud environment. How can we better track cost and costs and optimize the return on investment for our cloud spend?

Maintaining a cloud environment can be a balancing act of prioritizing current needs, challenges, and budget with innovation, long-term scalability, and future goals. Managing cloud efforts, especially at scale, requires first choosing the right cloud migration strategy at the start to reduce costly re-work over time, followed by setting disciplined management and governance practices and embracing automation. Leveraging repeatable patterns, accelerators, and partner tooling in our SmartCloud portfolio, we help clients to:

  • Establish clear cloud governance to prevent unnecessary resource sprawl and enable automation-first compliance. Governance must provide guidelines to inform and policies to enforce the best, agreed-upon practices for resource provisioning, access, and utilization.
  • Be disciplined and transparent in financial forecasting and budget enforcement: Enable cloud operations teams with analytics they need to drive budgeting assumptions and learn from spend over time. Enhanced tracking, tagging, and categorizing of resource allocations by project or purpose at a granular level enables cost visibility and allows for forecasting adjustments. Once budgets are set, teams can enforce budget thresholds and provide auto-alerts on usage and data storage patterns to nudge change at pre-defined levels of spend in a disciplined manner to enhance cost controls.
  • Optimize the portfolio at the enterprise level routinely to right-size and innovate. Underutilized instances, services, and storage happen. Tools age and become underutilized and need to be replaced with more advanced alternatives. Alternatively, portfolio reviews enable data-driven decisions around products and services that will be needed and support future planning.
  • Require onboarding approval for new tenants to ensure resources are tied to value drivers. Having a stage-gate around approvals adds a layer of control and accountability while also ensuring operations teams can manage capacity and scale where there is anticipated value to be gained.
Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Cloud Native Development. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartFactory, SmartPlatforms, SmartAssist
We struggle with development friction when building apps in the cloud? How can we be more efficient?

With governance guardrails and policy controls in place, we suggest arming developers with self-service tools that focus on clear and discoverable reuse, scaffolds, and best-practice patterns via a developer portal to reduce costly development frictions. Instead of creating per-application pipelines, for example, our SmartFactory approach accelerates the creation of tool-agnostic, templated workflows in dedicated libraries that can be updated once and used by multiple teams at scale. We suggest beginning with the following:

  • Leverage pre-configured baselines: Adopt best practices like microservices and containerization to enable development teams to work independently on discrete components and pre-configured baselines, architectures, and patterns to promote faster innovation, shorter development cycles, and increased agility in responding to changing demands.
  • Drive optimization through Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Our SmartCloud approach emphasizes the use of IaC tools, enabling clients to provision and manage resources in a consistent and automated manner. This helps optimize resource allocation, eliminating wasteful spending and ensuring that your cloud environment is finely tuned for performance and cost efficiency.
  • Secure and automate governance: A lack of focus on security can result in costly downtime when developing in the cloud. We integrate robust security controls and governance mechanisms into our SmartCloud approach and develop cloud-native baselines and accelerators.
  • Improve the developer experience with streamlined delivery pipelines and repeatable tooling: With expertise in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), we bring our SmartFactory offering to establish robust pipelines that automate the build, test, and deployment processes. This approach helps avoid technical debt by controlling pipeline code checks that do not allow high-risk code into higher environments and results in faster time-to-market for applications, reduced manual effort, and improved software quality—while improving the developer experience at a time when talent retention is vital.
Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Cloud Native Development. Offering Highlights: SmartDefense, SmartFactory, SmartPlatforms, SmartAssist
How can I get closer to a single pane of glass for my hybrid environment?

Organizations continue to grapple with the increased complexity of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud realities. While the cloud brings many benefits, organizations are challenged to monitor cloud spend and secure growing cloud environments. We have partnered with Kion, a cloud enablement solution that combines cloud management and governance together in a unified, single platform. Together with Kion, we help clients achieve automated provisioning, cost visibility and control, and continuous compliance in a way previously unimaginable.

 

We also realize that non-cloud infrastructure actions can be taken on the journey to the mythical "single pane." A focus on true integration and implementing the right architectures is required, alongside consistent operational tools for logging, monitoring, cyber, and more that feed into a centralized enterprise dashboard. This approach allows operational and development teams to have common reports, metrics, and dashboards across their hybrid landscape. Many cloud offerings today do support tools that can be deployed on "bare metal" and feed back to a centralized hub for enterprise reporting, but effort is required to remain abreast of the ever-evolving technology and security landscape that keeps that single pane current, actionable, and correct.

Journey Highlights: Cloud Native Development, Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Operations, Edge & Tactical. Cloud Offering Highlights: SmartDefense, SmartAssist, SmartEdge
Can we be sure that when in the cloud, our data is secure and that our system won’t go down?

As a cyber trailblazer, Booz Allen is trusted by leaders in civilian governmentintelligencedefense, and Fortune 500 companies to ensure security is built in from the start—mitigating threats to cloud environments and ensuring compliance before anything is configured. Our cloud solutions experts have applied and refined best practices over more than 1,000 large-scale migrations. As a member of the Cloud Security Alliance, we’re a leader in promoting best practices for security assurance in cloud computing along with being part of their Global Consultancy Program. We’re also the only partner authorized to provide accreditation and authorization services for the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Commercial Cloud Services program.

  • Enable resilience at scale: Failures may happen, but resiliency measures encapsulated in the Booz Allen SmartCloud approach can be built into cloud-native services that enable our clients to react to issues with minimal disruption to operations. There are many resiliency features cloud provides, but these require a different architecture than traditional, non-virtualized systems. Our SmartFactory offering can enable clients in leveraging container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, that support auto-scaling, fault tolerance, and more, ensuring smooth operations even during peak loads for missions that cannot go down and cannot be compromised.
  • Lead with security: With SmartDefense, cloud security is never bolted on—it can be integrated into every step of every cloud journey. SmartDefense offers comprehensive blueprints for integrated cybersecurity services and capabilities for system protection, access control, monitoring, and compliance with the latest industry cloud security standards and zero trust architecture (ZTA) principles. This includes encryption at rest and continuous, automated security monitoring throughout the technology stack. To provide a scalable cloud security architecture, our SmartDefense approach leverages Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD)—an affordable, integrated cloud security suite that can reduce the time to establish an initial cloud platform from weeks to minutes.
  • Keep data secure: There are multiple ways to mitigate risk for data residing on a cloud-based server. Maintaining an iterative, multi-tendency, multi-region backup can simultaneously ensure data security and bring down outage risk. Proactively investigating data threats as part of a comprehensive security strategy helps ensure protection from external bad actors. Using encryption keys, envelope encryption, and securing user access to role-based controls protects data vulnerabilities that can arise from user error.
Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Cloud Native Development. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartAssist

Learn more about SmartDefense

Learn more about Virtual Cloud Defense

How can we leverage cloud benefits when in tactical environments where network connectivity may be intermittent?

Booz Allen’s SmartEdge:

A suite of edge cloud solutions extends mission-enhancing cloud capabilities to the distributed and disconnected edge. This new paradigm means faster decentralized decision making for warfighters, first responders, medical professionals, health and safety inspectors, law enforcement, and space researchers. Fueled by exponential growth in AI innovations, sensor-generated data, and the expansion of 5G and low-earth-orbit satellite communications, SmartEdge cloud solutions can offer new transformations to tactical missions today.

 

Use Cases and Edge Cloud Lab:

Booz Allen combines deep mission expertise with strong relationships with the startup and vendor ecosystem to integrate solutions that provide Zero Trust Security and solve mission challenges in low-latency, high-bandwidth, and disconnected use cases. Leveraging Booz Allen’s multi-vendor solutions Edge Cloud Lab, we rapidly develop, test, and deliver mission-grade and field-ready innovative edge cloud solutions for a wide range of civilian, industrial, defense, and intelligence mission operations.

Journey Highlights: Rationalization & Strategy, Hybrid & Multi-cloud Operations. Offering Highlights: Security SmartDefense, SmartLift, SmartAssist, SmartEdge

Learn more about SmartEdge

Client Impact

Key Partners

We are a proud sponsor of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and a top partner of leading technology providers such as Databricks, Salesforce, Appian, Pega, Snowflake, and NVIDIA.

AWS
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Google Cloud
Kion
Microsoft

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