Case Study

Zero Trust & DR on Azure

From fragmented posture to a secure, repeatable deployment pattern aligned to EO 14028 and NIST 800-53 Rev 5.

Snapshot

Client

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS)

Industry

Federal – Health & Human Services

Compliance

Impact to Date

POA&Ms

71 → 0

Zero Trust maturity target

1.53 → 3.00

Infra deploy via Terraform

< 60 min

CSA findings

0 critical/high

Mission & Challenge

HHS required continuity of services for the Human Resources Management Enterprise Services Bus (HRMESB) on Azure while measurably improving cyber resilience. The mandate: reduce inherited POA&Ms, enable disaster recovery in a target region, and move to a secure, repeatable deployment pattern – minimizing tenant-wide permissions and modernizing legacy SFTP.

What We Did

Fix

  • Resolved legacy POA&Ms with evidenceable remediation steps.
  • Hardened baselines and IAM; standardized RBAC.
  • Centralized logging and alerting for faster issue triage.

Fortify

  • DR target-region and operational runbooks.
  • Terraform for consistent, environment-based deployments.
  • Replaced VM-based SFTP with Azure Blob SFTP and event-driven processing.

Future-Proof

  • Zero Trust roadmap aligned to HHS priorities.
  • User-Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI) per environment to enforce least privilege.
  • Defender for Cloud coverage and alerting.

What Tools & Platforms

Entra ID (AAD)

Identity & Access, RBAC

UAMI + Key Vault

Secrets & Least Privilege

Terraform

IaC, Workspaces, Drift Detection

GitHub Actions

CI/CD, Provenance

Defender for Cloud

Cloud Posture & Alerts

OWASP ZAP

DAST in pipeline

SonarQube

SAST & quality gates

Azure Blob SFTP

VM-free, event-driven

Delivery Details

Pipelines

GitHub Actions with OWASP ZAP & SonarQube gates; promotion policies by environment.

IaC

Terraform with per-environment workspaces; drift detection and documented change history.

Observability

Centralized logs/dashboards; alert routing; compliance-ready evidence exports.

Runbooks

DR failover procedure, onboarding/offboarding, and control evidence collection.

More Case Studies

View All

Zero Trust & DR on Azure

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS)
HHS required continuity of services for the Human Resources Management Enterprise Services Bus (HRMESB) on Azure while measurably improving cyber resilience.
Case Study

Cloud Refactoring & Modernization on AWS

Selective Service System (SSS)
From legacy silos to secure, event-driven services and analytics on Amazon Redshift – aligned to federal guidance.
Case Study
Secret Link