Updated Environment for Modern Workloads in Defence

Our defence customer was seeking to modernise and uplift their core business operating environment. Chamonix was engaged to establish a new secured environment that would serve as a development environment for, and eventually support, modern workloads. This environment was required to be IRAP accredited with consideration given to the following potential use cases; holding OFFICIAL: SENSITIVE data, holding PROTECTED data, and potentially holding EXIM data if required.

To enable our customer to migrate business workloads to a modern technology stack, the new environment needed to provide:

• Secured corporate network capable of support multiple teams with physical and logical segregation
• Establishment of managed devices and creation of a new standard operating environment
• Remote and mobile workforce enablement from managed devices
• Secured development environment for modern workflows
• Access to project management and collaboration functions
• Migration of users, collaboration spaces and data from legacy environment
• Long term archive for official records
• On-going management and support of the environment and security accreditations

Our Approach

The existing environment had been built for legacy workloads and was no longer compatible with the organisation’s future IT strategy. To enable our customer to achieve their objectives, we needed to design and implement a new modern environment. Noting the accreditation requirements, a security first approach was adopted.

We were initially engaged tactically to establish a baseline of functionality within the existing environment to enable business operations to continue without undue interruption. This included the establishment of a modern SharePoint implementation and remote access through the existing network infrastructure to enable collaboration and mobile work.

The Chamonix team then worked closely with our customer to design a future state environment capable of hosting the required workloads whilst enabling a more modern approach to remote work and facilitating the required current and potential future accreditation pathways. The design phase looked at:

• Secured data centre hosting within Australia for non-cloud compatible workloads
• Network & Server Infrastructure including firewalls, switches, wireless
• Modern operating systems
• M365
• Standard operating environment (incl. both virtual and physical end user ‘devices’)
• End user device control
• Identity and access management
• Governance
• Modern applications and collaboration services
• Monitoring

We developed an accreditation alongside the design to enable a staged approach and rollout of services in-line with client milestones.

Implementation and accreditation work is currently underway with Chamonix having established a continuous improvements plan with our customer to support the evolution of their technology roadmap. This includes advice on how the organisation can leverage the Cloud in a secure manner that meets their specific requirements.

Chamonix has provided support services for users and third-party developers and engineers and will continue to support the transition into this new environment. The Chamonix team will also provide monitoring and maintenance services for this environment once built.

Through our ‘end to end’ approach, Chamonix continues to provide our customer ongoing managed support services across both their legacy and modern workloads for optimal ease of transition.