Background:

We’ve been supporting NCCOS’ IT Services since 2012, first as a subcontractor, then as the Prime as of 2015. We leverage common shared services through the aggregation of infrastructure requirements that will provide enterprise solutions. GAMA-1 supports the NOS’ Strategic outcome to provide Cloud-based services to support technologies, modern frameworks, standardization, and enterprise cloud capabilities. GAMA-1 supports 425 End Users, 600 Managed Devices, and 18 Windows & Linux servers.

Solution:

In support of NCCOS’ goals to consolidate and reduce their IT footprint, GAMA-1 worked with NCCOS Management in assessing both commercial and government service offerings, such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, to identify the right solutions to meet their needs.   GAMA-1 evaluated NCCOS systems, hardware, applications, websites, and databases to assess the feasibility of employing a cloud-based or other shared services solutions. Our Network Engineers (NE) ensured operational stability of the NCCOS network by performing strategic network-related enhancements. We reviewed the existing tools, their configurations, established thresholds, and touch points, and delivered an analysis with recommendations to the Task Manager (TM) which provided the foundation to NCCOS migration to the cloud. 

We also performed a cloud readiness review of the NCCOS websites, applications and databases, developing, developing a deployment schedule, setting priorities, and making necessary changes before moving ALL on-premise systems to the cloud.

Outcomes:

Major accomplishments include the migration of NCCO’s web and application services to the cloud, increased their HPC capacity, improved customer satisfaction, and IT Security posture, including the migration of common NCCOS services and IT infrastructure to NOS OCIO.  

For NOS, GAMA-1’s scientific computing specialist, database administrators, software programmers and web developers support NCCOS scientists and researchers by developing, testing, and deploying data processing, storage, archival, and retrieval systems for their complex coastal models, simulations and scientific data sets (e.g., marine mammal migrations, algae blooms in the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay water conditions, shorebird migrations, etc.). These systems leverage both traditional on-premise and cloud-based solutions (Microsoft Azure) presenting a robust capability for scientists and researchers to share data and research with Federal, state, local, private, and university customers. 

By utilizing the Azure cloud infrastructure, we have been able to use IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to meet our needs in both storage, virtual infrastructure, hosting websites and databases along with meeting security requirements.  With moving to Azure, being able to scale up an application (App service Plan) can now take minutes instead of days.