Case Study: FEMA Grants Management

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) plays a critical role in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Part of that role involves the management of billions of dollars in grants and federal assistance for public and private entities.

At the moment, the agency is undertaking a massive grants management modernization effort. This involves process and policy changes, organizational changes, system modernization, and new data management practices. For any large organization that’s no easy task. Combine that with federal procurement cycles, legacy systems, and agency-wide process initiatives, and it gets extremely complex.

At OneGlobe we aim to make sure the technical aspects of modernization are the easy part, letting our customers focus on the critical organizational changes that come along with this sort of effort.

Lets consider a few goals on the technical side of the effort:

Propagate Agile delivery within the agency and improve speed to market
Leverage modern platforms and architectures to consolidate functions across 11+ grant systems into a single comprehensive platform
Stand up to FEMA’s disaster-time performance and uptime demands
Do it securely and in compliance with DHS security practices

Customer challenges

Support for steady state operations with disaster response usage spikes at a moment’s notice
Uptime and availability requirement to support survivor needs
Legacy systems rely on legacy infrastructure and platform management practices.
Mission function distributed across several secure agency systems

The OneGlobe solution

The solution here is a combination of technologies and sound practices. We leverage the AWS GovCloud, ensuring a secure and FedRAMP-compliant baseline of infrastructure and services. Consolidated grants management functions are implemented as containerized microservices and deployed using Red Hat OpenShift as a container platform. We partner with mission stakeholders in an Agile Kanban engineering process that ensures a continuous flow of functionality to production.

Great outcomes

When you start with the right tools, bring the right practices, and the people with the skills to use them, you get the right outcomes:

250+ automated deployments to production, zero downtime through one year of production use
Fully automated DevSecOps delivery pipeline, plus continuous monitoring, that ensures compliance with DHS sensitive security guidelines
Steady state cost savings with urgent disaster scalability on AWS’s service portfolio
Secure data integration at rest and in motion using S3, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, and Data Migration Service – all available for agency analytics
Lead time to production of days or hours, rather than weeks or months