The Department of State’s (DOS) Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs' (ECA) mission is to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange that assist in the development of peaceful relations. The Office of Public Affairs and Strategic Communications (ECA/PASC) provides a variety of outreach support services to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. In support of its mission, ECA has made a significant investment in digital communications and its official websites including ten unique websites hosted that were previously hosted in an IBM FedRAMP environment. The websites are built on Drupal, WordPress, and ResourceSpace platforms. ECA required Async-Nu Microsystems (ASYNC-NU) to migrate the ten unique websites to DOS Southeast Amazon Web Service (SE-AWS) Moderate hosting environment. SE-AWS Moderate is an AWS Commercial environment, which is a Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) Moderate approved environment. SE-AWS Moderate DOS’ default environment for customer workloads that contain information up to the FISMA Moderate impact level. 

Objectives
In 2021, ECA wanted to improve the hosting environment of the ten websites managed by PASC, in order to provide more flexible service options and an increased level of management control. The DOS SE-AWS Moderate environment allowed PASC to enhance the overall security, compliance, and operational capabilities of PASC ten websites.  

Solutions
ASYNC-NU migrated PASC’s ten public-facing Drupal, WordPress, and ResourceSpace websites to DOS’ SE-AWS Moderate environment in 2 weeks with minimal downtime. ASYNC-NU was responsible for determining which available environment to migrate to (Low, Moderate, or High), migrating or re-building all resources within their chosen SE-AWS environment, and planed for all costs applicable to their migration approach and project timeline, as well as costs relevant to their to-be/chosen SE-AWS environment. 

Results 

Result 1: ASYNC-NU migrated PASC’s ten Drupal, WordPress, and ResourceSpace websites from a FedRAMP-approved IBM environment to DOS’ FISMA-approved SE-AWS Moderate environment in two weeks. 

Result 2: ASYNC-NU improved the flexibility, control, compliance, and security of PASC’s ten public-facing websites. 

Result 3: PASC realized 30% operational savings and an 80% reduction in help-desk tickets thanks to the migrations and its new DevOps model with full agency accountability. PASC now has simple auto-scaling on all environments. 

At a Glance 

Challenges 

• Website Downtime 

• Retaining Hosting Capabilities 

• Short Migration Timeline 

Results 

• Improved Website Flexibility, Control, Compliance, and Security 

• 30% Operational Savings 

• 99.9% Website Uptime