DOJ ATF Leverages AWS Cloud Infrastructure to Support IT Modernization Strategy

The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has deployed an Amazon Web Services architecture to accelerate the migration of applications and data to the cloud.

Mason McDaniel, ATF’s chief technology officer, told reporters at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. that the bureau developed a strategy for modernizing their aging information technology systems and enabling them to operate in a common cloud environment, AWS said in a blog post published Friday.

“We have a terrible history of trying to pull out an individual system in isolation and modernize it,” he said. “All those interconnections you know about and don’t know about have really just caused those to fail most of the time.”

According to McDaniel, ATF built an AWS-based enterprise environment for its applications and achieved an authority to operate following its transition of development, test and production data to the cloud.