In 2009, Aquilent moved its corporate infrastructure and back office applications to AWS, and its corporate data center was completely dismantled. “It became clear to Aquilent in 2009 that AWS was going to be a leader for federal customers in public cloud; and we wanted to start working with AWS as early as we could to build our business around the platform,” says Pietrasanta. “Originally, we engaged with other cloud providers, but we recognized the AWS pricing model and feature set to be better suited, in our opinion, to the federal government space.” The stringent security requirements of AWS was also appealing to the Aquilent team, which helps customers take advantage of the

AWS GovCloud (US) region. “GovCloud gives government agencies and contractors the ability to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements, such as FISMA, ITAR, HIPAA, SOC 1, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1,” explains Pietrasanta. “For our customers, the combination of Aquilent, AWS, and GSA reduces security concerns, simplifies procurement, and eases implementation helping to remove the barriers encumbering the federal government’s move to the cloud.”

Aquilent offers a number of services to customers on AWS, including reseller and managed services, along with cloud enablement, transition, and security consultative services. The company takes advantage of a large number of AWS services primarily driven by customer requirements, including core services such as

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The company uses all FedRAMP-compliant services, which includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). And the team highlighted AWS CloudTrail as helpful in meeting customer workload security requirements.

“Year-after-year, we continue to see an increase in government customer interest to move workloads to AWS with Aquilent," explains Pietrasanta. Aquilent itself has continued to expand its internal use of AWS. The company moved all desktops to AWS in 2015 and fully virtualized the desktops, “enabling a completely modern workforce,” says Pietrasanta. “Employees can use any device they like – desktop, laptop, tablet, phone – to work any way they prefer.” This has also improved Aquilent’s security posture. “From being able to easily patch all virtual desktops no matter where the user is, to quickly identifying and shutting down suspicious activity, to rapidly and regularly wiping more secure machines with zero downtime and no impact to the end users, we’ve recognized a significant increase in our ability to secure our environment,” explains Pietrasanta.