Context
A defense health technology company was preparing to deliver field-captured data into a Department of Defense mission partner environment. The path would run from a disconnected operating environment, across a transport link that drops for hours at a time, into an accredited GovCloud enclave, and out to an external partner sitting outside the accreditation boundary. The company would be operating under an authorization it inherited rather than owned, so choosing any component outside the approved platform would have broken that inheritance. Leadership needed one reviewable picture of the end-to-end path, the security decision behind every hop, and confidence the design would hold when the government asked how the data was protected.
Our Approach
ResilientTech Advisors delivered the Phase I architecture scoping engagement: a single OV-1 level architecture depicting end-to-end data transit from the tactical edge through the accredited enclave to the mission partner domain. We designed to the client’s real constraints rather than to the reference pattern named in the statement of work, and we resolved the questions that would have surfaced later during authorization review. Key actions included:
- Confirming the design parameters that drive the architecture directly with the client, including data type and file size, the satellite transport path and its denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited conditions, and the requirement to preserve inherited continuous ATO.
- Identifying that the serverless component named in the statement of work could not be used, because it sits outside the accredited platform boundary and would break ATO inheritance, and because its payload limit could not carry the file sizes in scope. We raised this early and replaced it in the design.
- Defining a three trust zone model spanning the tactical edge, the IL4/IL5 GovCloud enclave, and the external mission partner domain, so that every component had a stated trust boundary and a stated reason for sitting where it does.
- Designing the end-to-end data flow across seven processing stages, including store and forward at the edge for link outages, resumable multipart upload so a dropped connection costs one part rather than an entire file, and a durable queue with a dead-letter path so no event is lost when arrivals outpace processing.
- Applying a security overlay to every stage covering data, identity and authentication, encryption, key management, integrity, and constraints, with the design rationale documented for each decision rather than asserted.
- Establishing chain of custody through cryptographic hashing computed at capture and verified at every handoff, with separate customer-managed keys for ingest and output so the two sides of the boundary never share a key.
- Challenging the assumption that the identifier in the data was not personal information, and designing de-identification to occur inside the enclave before anything moves outward, so the architecture holds regardless of how that question is later ruled.
- Evaluating and documenting three architectural alternatives that were considered and rejected, covering the network path, the storage service, and the hashing algorithm, so the client could defend the design rather than only present it.
Impact
- Delivered the complete end-to-end architecture within a 30-day engagement, closed on a single live review with the client accepting the deliverable as presented.
- Translated a complex, multi-boundary architecture into a picture the client’s leadership could follow and defend, giving them a document ready for government review.
- Removed a design flaw carried in the statement of work before any build work began, preventing a component choice that would have broken continuous ATO inheritance and could not have handled the file sizes in scope.
- Preserved the client’s inherited continuous ATO by confining the architecture to components inside the accredited platform boundary, avoiding a separate authorization effort.
- Maintained IL4/IL5 handling across the full path from tactical edge to enclave, with a pull-only egress model that opens no outbound path from the accredited environment.
- Settled an open question about personal information by design instead of by assumption, so that even a breach in the partner domain would expose no one’s protected information.
Related Services
- Cyber Risk & Strategy
- Security Engineering & Operations
- Compliance & Assurance
- Embedded Cyber Leadership
“ResilientTech Advisors caught a constraint we hadn’t accounted for, and worked it out quickly. They walked the architecture in layers, the trust zones first, then the data flow, then the security over the top, and it brought the whole thing together. I could follow something that complicated, and that is a testament to their knowledge.”
Chief Executive Officer, Defense Health Technology Company
This engagement reflects ResilientTech Advisors’ ability to design for the constraints that actually govern an environment, to say clearly when a stated approach will not work and offer the one that will, and to turn a complex, multi-boundary architecture into something a leader can review, accept, and defend.