AWS Cloud Services for Federal Civilian Agencies

Backups protect data so you can restore it, but restores can take time and may not meet strict uptime needs. Disaster Recovery (DR) is a full recovery plan for the service—architecture, failover/failback, runbooks, and testing—to meet specific RTO/RPO targets.

At a minimum, run a DR test annually and after any major platform change. For higher criticality systems, test quarterly (or at least twice a year) so your runbooks, people, and tooling stay production-ready.

You’ll receive a test report with what was executed, timestamps and key metrics (actual RTO/RPO vs targets), issues found, remediation actions, and updated runbooks/checklists—plus screenshots/log excerpts where needed to support oversight.

At minimum, plan for 3 accounts: Management, Shared Services/Security (logging + tooling), and Production workloads. Most teams add Dev/Test as a separate account (so 4–5 total) as they scale, with additional accounts only when there’s a clear separation need (risk, billing, or governance).

You’ll receive architecture diagrams, an implementation summary, runbooks (operations, DR/cutover if applicable), access/IAM guidance, logging/monitoring baseline details, and a next-steps backlog so your team can operate and extend the environment confidently.

It depends on your timeline and risk tolerance: lift-and-shift is best to move fast and reduce data center pressure, then modernize in phases; modernization is best when you need performance, scalability, or cost gains right away and can invest in refactoring. Most organizations do a hybrid approach—lift-and-shift the low-risk apps first, modernize the ones that drive mission or revenue.

We lock scope, deliverables, and acceptance criteria up front, track work against a defined backlog, and route anything new through a formal change request (impact to timeline/cost documented) before it’s added.

AWS Control Tower for most SMB and federal-civilian teams—faster, standardized, and easier to operate.

Custom makes sense when you have non-standard requirements (legacy org structure, complex networking, strict toolchain constraints, or existing multi-account patterns) that Control Tower can’t fit cleanly.

Choose Control Tower when you want a proven multi-account baseline, guardrails, and faster onboarding with less custom code to maintain.

Custom is best when you need deep customization around account vending, networking, identity integration, or governance workflows that go beyond Control Tower’s opinionated model.

Control Tower can absolutely be used in federal contexts—what matters is the controls implementation, logging, access model, documentation artifacts, and validation, not the branding of the landing zone.

Yes. We typically start with Control Tower for speed, then extend with additional guardrails, logging, and account patterns as the environment matures.

Control Tower: faster time-to-value, standard operations.

Custom: more flexibility, but higher build/maintenance overhead and more ways to drift.