Case Study

Summary

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is the chief human resources agency and personnel policy manager for the federal government. Nava has partnered with OPM to modernize IT products, helping to provide the federal workforce with vital human services such as health care, retirement benefits, and more. A critical aspect of this work is helping OPM as they migrate their applications from traditional data centers to the cloud. This gives OPM a more secure, cost-effective, and flexible way to house the applications that provide essential services to over 9 million federal employees, retirees, former employees, and family members. 

Approach

We’re helping OPM build cloud-native solutions, which means we’re optimizing OPM's applications to work better in the cloud rather than simply shifting existing infrastructure to the cloud.

Outcomes

By building cloud-native solutions with OPM, we’re helping to set the agency up for successful future cloud adoption. This is because cloud-native solutions take advantage of all cloud services have to offer, such as scalability, efficiency, and security. For instance, building cloud-native solutions enables OPM to be much more flexible in the face of policy and usage changes. If one of OPM’s applications were to see a spike in activity, the cloud capability we’re building would automatically add capacity to accommodate that spike with no interruption in service. Ultimately, this improves experiences for the federal employees who use OPM’s applications.

Cloud-native solutions are also more cost-effective in the long term because it’s expensive to purchase, rent, and maintain the physical infrastructure that houses applications. With cloud-native applications, OPM will only pay for the infrastructure they use rather than paying for an entire data center. Cloud-native applications also give OPM a granular view of what specific applications cost to run, enabling them to make data-informed financial decisions. And with cloud-native solutions, we’re able to leverage infrastructure-as-code (IaC). This means all of our deployment processes are scripted, automated, and repeatable, ultimately improving reliability and reducing costs. 

Finally, our development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) approach ensures stable operations of OPM’s applications because it leverages automation to bake security and best practices into deployment and release management processes. This means federal employees will reliably be able to access the services they need, such as comparing health care plans and checking plan rates. 

Process

The biggest challenge of this work was helping OPM manage numerous environments while ensuring their applications continued to run during migration. We stayed organized by using a ticketing system to manage work and by communicating often with other vendor teams and with OPM’s DevOps team. 

In order to ensure the applications were running in the cloud as planned, we maintained six environments for each application — dev, test, and production on the legacy servers, and dev, test, and production in the cloud. IaC enabled us to repeat tests we established in the dev environment across the other environments, helping us to save time and ensure accuracy. 

We know that OPM staff are the experts on their applications, which is why we worked with OPM to build a solution that enabled their product owners to A/B test the legacy applications against the cloud-native applications. 

Conclusion

Cloud-native solutions offer OPM a more secure, flexible, and cost-effective way to manage their applications, benefiting the millions of federal employees that rely on OPM for crucial human services. 

Special thanks to Chloe Hilles for contributing to this article.