SAIC Introduces Cloud Migration Edge

Science Applications International Corp. launched today Cloud Migration Edge, a multi-tiered methodology that migrates and transforms customers’ current IT applications and systems to a cloud environment securely and effectively. As a cloud services integrator, SAIC teams with the best cloud technology providers to engineer solutions that meet customers’ individual needs. 

Cloud Migration Edge is a holistic, five-step approach that encompasses specialized tools, processes, and best practices to guide the cloud migration life cycle and provide ongoing improvement. This formalized framework supports the step-by-step implementation of a mission-centric cloud computing environment by breaking down the cloud migration process into standardized components at each layer of the IT service life cycle.

“Our advanced cloud expertise and proven methodology allow our federal government customers to rapidly and securely integrate and adapt cloud technologies to improve delivery of their IT services,” said Charles Onstott, SAIC senior vice president and general manager of the Cyber, Cloud, and Data Science Service Line. “To accomplish this, we have taken our IT business transformation, cybersecurity, and cloud computing expertise to deliver a systematic approach to cloud migration, while applying IT Infrastructure Library best practices.”

Additionally, SAIC’s customized approach includes several aspects of business transformation such as policies, processes, security, governance, architecture, applications, and change/risk management.

“Our cloud services integration solution creates a comprehensive and secure IT environment, crafted to meet our customers’ unique requirements, using both existing customer investments and modern cloud technologies,” said Coby Holloway, SAIC vice president of Cloud Computing and Business Transformation Services.

SAIC works with customers to analyze their requirements and business needs, develop the appropriate architecture, design the migration approach, and implement the transition plans to include change and risk management. SAIC also establishes a new operations and maintenance model based on the target architecture that includes cloud management and continuous service improvement.

“Migration is not just about the applications, it is about transforming the way business and missions are performed while providing new capabilities that cloud-based systems enable,” Onstott continued. “We evaluate the current system and requirements, future needs, what makes sense to migrate and how, the risks involved, the transition process needed, policies, people, processes and how those are affected, and develop the best implementation plan to transition the business with the lowest impacts on productivity and current operations.”

As part of SAIC’s total solution, Cloud Migration Edge uses industry-leading capabilities from Amazon Web Services, EMC, NetApp, RedHat, VMware, and others. As a cloud services integrator, SAIC is able to bring the best solutions from our partners across the cloud computing industry, avoiding vendor bias and lock-in.

SAIC Cloud Migration Edge five-phase methodology:

Assess and Strategize: SAIC defines objectives and builds a cloud strategy that meets technical, regulatory compliance, and security requirements. This involves creating assessments, building requirements, developing a business case, and outlining a return on investment.

Design: SAIC tailors a solution that includes the cloud platform, security, management, monitoring, and final design to achieve each customer’s goals. SAIC uses a comprehensive systems engineering approach to create both a final cloud-enabled infrastructure as well as a detailed migration strategy that includes transformation of the customer’s IT processes and organization to a cloud service delivery model.

Transition: During this step, SAIC migrates IT services to the cloud with minimal disruption using unique managed business transformation approach, including an implementation plan, operational testing, and final execution.

Operate: SAIC orchestrates cloud services to meet performance levels using proven processes to mitigate risk with constant monitoring. SAIC will organize, monitor, verify, report, and manage various operational and governance activities that ensure the production environment meets or exceeds performance metrics. SAIC also introduces heavy automation to increase the efficiency and consistency of the new services, and to facilitate onboarding and cloud service adoption.

Improve: SAIC capitalizes on the flexibility of cloud-enabled architectures to optimize service value. During this phase, SAIC provides customers with services, including project management, staff augmentation, data migration, workload migration, independent verification and validation testing, and concept operations updates. Customers benefit from the lessons learned and best practices developed across all of SAIC’s cloud work, which are used to continually update our Cloud Migration Edge approach and implementations. This phase involves evaluating service delivery, identifying, and implementing opportunities for improvement.