Over 6,500 government agencies now use cloud solutions provided by Amazon Web Services Inc., and one of the users of AWS GovCloud is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The law enforcement agency had been saddled with an aging information-technology infrastructure, and the FBI’s computer operations leadership became accustomed to hearing complaints from employees about system performance. Then the FBI worked with Accenture Federal Services to transition a portion of its operations to GovCloud, and the result was a “Most Customer Obsessed Mission Based Win – Federal” award from the AWS Public Sector organization to Accenture in 2020.

“We were always seeing a performance hit on our infrastructure, and we always suspected that by moving to the GovCloud we would see an increase in performance,” said Frank Urbano (pictured, right), program manager at the FBI. “Once we moved over to the cloud… we heard crickets. The end users haven’t been complaining.”

Urbano spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. He was joined by Gregory Siegel (pictured, left), senior manager at Accenture Federal Services, and they discussed how Accenture was able to draw on past experience to assist the FBI, the agency’s sudden pivot when COVID-19 impacted IT operations, and leveraging AWS services in the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Major system transition

It was not the first time that FBI operations had been moved to the cloud, but it was one of the first big systems to make the transition, according to Siegel.

“You see over time in traditional data centers how performance requirements increase, but they are on hardware and not easily able to adapt and overcome those,” Siegel said. “We were able to pull on a few other experiences that the firm has had moving other similar technologies to the cloud and then combine that with the experience implementing technology at the FBI.”

The public sector has been heavily impacted by the global pandemic, and the FBI was no exception. Before COVID-19 shut down most federal offices, Urbano and his team had been working on a project scheduled for delivery in September. Accenture suggested moving develop and test environments to GovCloud so the FBI’s developers could continue work, and the project remained on track.

“Being with the Bureau for 31 years, I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that we would have people working from home, be able to remote in and actually do development,” Urbano said. “We did it all within two weeks.”

The FBI has benefited from the cloud’s architectural flexibility and allowing the IT organization to essentially control its own destiny. Change requests for firewall configurations now no longer require a complicated and time-consuming process for approval, as there is confidence in the cloud’s overall security.

“When we first moved to the cloud, the primary mission was getting there securely, getting there within policy and getting operational,” Siegel said. “We’re really focused on continuing to look at the investments that AWS is making in the technologies that are coming next. We’re looking for ways to maximize and use those services to save costs and improve performance, all of those things that go along with getting more mature in the cloud.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE