Month: May 2023

Challenge/Scope

Our Department of Homeland Security (DHS) customer is transforming its citizen applicaton services culture to improve the user experience for its stakeholders. The agency needed to bridge the gap and moving from a paper-based environment to digital, while keeping pace with the continuous evolution of technology.

Approach/Solution

To address this challenge, our customer engaged Highlight and others to build a series of Development Security Operations (DevSecOps) and modernization teams. Highlight, a key prime on the program, develops, manages, and executes across multiple Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) DevSecOps teams to deliver domain-driven design, user-centered design, security, and Agile development support for the modernization of multiple systems and migration to the cloud.

Our SAFe Agile teams leveraged SecDevOps pipeline as code, continuous automation, and microservices using Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools and containerization technologies to improve the agency’s speed and agility. Highlight built a DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline that enabled the agency to design, develop, and deploy secure critical services more quickly, impacting both citizens and internal government users.

Highlight created a detailed plan for migrating microservices from Red Hat OpenShift to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), ensuring a managed control plane with lower cost, higher reliability, availability, and built-in security and compliance against various standards. The team also migrated and rewrote on-premises Windows services to containerized, Java-based microservices in AWS, leveraging a shared CI/CD pipeline for continuous deployment and code quality scanning.

To enhance security, Highlight automated security patching using Ansible Tower, enabling our customer to quickly and automatically push updates, manage configuration, and deploy patches to both cloud and on-premise servers.

Furthermore, Highlight utilized Machine Learning to predict the completion time of forms processed, integrating a Survival Cox model into a Python Flask API hosted on a Gunicorn web server. The team used ML Flow to track model performance metrics, facilitating smoother experimentation and continuous improvement of the predictive analysis.

Capabilities

• DevSecOps
• Cloud Migration
• Integrated Security and Automation 
• Microservice Development, Migration, and Maintenance
• UI/UX
• NIST Compliance

Results/Outcomes

By leveraging the global infrastructure of AWS, our customers can now deploy applications and rapidly scale up to meet their workload requirements across the United States. The EKS control plane dynamically scales up to meet workload requirements as the cluster grows, offering flexibility in choosing managed node groups for cost-optimized compute using AWS, the customer’s VPC, and Rancher for serverless deployment.

Highlight’s design for transitioning from OpenShift to Amazon EKS has enabled our customer to manage the scheduling, discovery, and coordination of different services more effectively. This solution has resulted in an impressive $5 million in annual cost savings compared to the legacy solution.

Challenge/Scope

The Army is responsible for delivering enterprise common shared services to enable its units to deploy applications across multiple classification levels and multiple cloud environments. To effectively serve their stakeholders, our Army client needed to revamp their Toolchain-as-a-Service, including software purchase requests and procurement workflows.

Approach/Solution

Highlight worked quickly, on parallel tracks, to discover and analyze all of the customer’s software assets, and post-discovery develop a procurement and tracking solution. We researched and assessed open-source, COTS, and Government-Off-The-Shelf solutions to determine a solution that meets their needs from a functional, enterprise and security standpoint. Knowing that the customer was standing up ServiceNow as their ITSM, we proposed a ServiceNow workflow solution for procuring toolchain software. Army needed the improved service faster than the production environment could accommodate.

Highlight used a phased functionality approach, designing and implementing a software asset management system using an Excel back-end and a PowerApps interface (Power BI), while working with our customer to implement a Phase Two ServiceNow software procurement application. Our UX team worked closely with Army stakeholders to understand the procurement process and design an effective request, approval and purchase workflow for automation. In turn, we delivered a consistent workflow with designated request forms for POCs, as well as an automated software asset management system that ensures easy retrieval and analysis of software asset data, which can be used to help drive informed enterprise decisions.

Phase Two of development resulted in the Software License Management (SLiM) tool. SLiM allows users to view the software catalog, request and receive new software through automated workflow, and offers managed user permissions, budget, and more.
Streamlining the request to delivery, SLiM routes new requests through the approval
channels, and delivers to the procurement point of contact for next steps, based on
the set evaluation criteria. We embed security checks throughout the procurement and management process to ensure compliance within the client environment. SLiM provides visibility into the requests, usage, inventory, security, and financials, allowing managers to see a full view of their software.

In parallel, Highlight’s Cloud Software Management Services team provides toolchain as an enterprise service operating on AWS and Azure GovCloud platforms. We procure and manage software assets and programming tools used to perform complex software development tasks, and create software products within the DevSecOps Pipeline. These include enterprise common shared services tools, data service tools, and business tools that enable our customer to communicate, function, and manage various data sources.

Capabilities

• DevSecOps
• COTS, ServiceNow Delivery
• Software Asset Management 
• Software License Procurement 
• cATO Facilitation and Management
• cRMF Compliance

Results/Outcomes

Our solution provided teams inside of the Army with a secure software development ecosystem complete with an audited software library, free from redundancies and waste, with an updated procurement workflow to ensure existing licenses are maintained and new purchase requests are executed in a timely fashion. Highlight created a toolchain marketplace where enterprise licenses and approved open-source tools can be delivered to teams quickly in a self-service process. We designed and implemented an automated software license management system that ensures easy retrieval and analysis of software asset data, which can be used to help drive informed enterprise decisions and decreases time-to-field software.

Challenge/Scope

In March 2020, the pandemic left thousands of Americans facing financial hardship. Under the expansion with the CARES Act, The Small Business Administration was faced with rapidly and exponentially scaling their disaster relief loan operations to meet the needs of small businesses, entrepreneurs, and citizens across the nation.

Approach/Solution

Highlight rapidly expanded our disaster loan support team, providing resources in response to the pandemic to review, administer, and audit loans provisioned by the various programs of the CARES act.Our team recruited, and vetted  over 500  financial and administrative in one week to help support SBA Loan Servicing Centers nationwide, resulting in the onboarding of over 1800 support staff within 90 days.  Highlight’s team leveraged our recruitment infrastructure, scalable operational procedures, and holistic staffing workflow to expand scope and capability coverage to meet the mission needs. Our integrated workflow used experienced recruiters, subject matter experts, operations coordinators, human resources team members, and program managers to source, vet, and manage personnel, with agile adoption of agency feedback and shifting contract requirements.

Highlight used our Mission-at-Scale (MAS) delivery framework to manage personnel performance and individual development, while maintaining quality across the program ecosystem. Foundational to our MAS approach is giving management access to the essential software systems for financials, personnel, and performance to inform day-to-day operations decisions. We leveraged operations coordinators as integral keys to our success, providing additional support to our employees and serving as liaison between program manager rand  customer to ensure alignment with key mission objectives and service delivery. This integrated approach enabled leadership real time access to critical resources to solve problems, answer program personnel questions, and support the overall mission of our customers.

Capabilities

• Financial Management
• Contact Center Support
• Full Lifecycle Loan Management
• Risk Management
• Legal Support
• Information Technology 
• Strategic Communication
• Administrative Support
• Staff Augmentation

Results/Outcomes

Highlight provided over 3000 financial professionals over the course of the pandemic, assisting the SBA in providing a critical financial lifeline for American small businesses. Our team of dedicated lending, administrative. legal and information technology professionals supported SBA Centers and Offices onsite and remotely with staff in 48 states.  Our team aided the SBA in reaching impacted businesses to provide needed support with the overarching goal of increasing economic stability across impacted communities.