The United States Coast Guard (USCG) plays a pivotal role in safeguarding America’s waters, ensuring maritime safety, security, and stewardship. As maritime challenges evolve, so must the USCG’s software solutions respond efficiently and effectively. Yet, continuous agency operations and new, emerging mission needs rely on many aging, legacy software applications that are costly and challenging to upgrade.
“We have a litany of applications that are just old, aged, decrepit, brittle—and they have to be modernized,” says Jeffery Allen Stuart, Director, USCG C5ISC.
While performing its mission, the USCG grappled with an outdated software development model, hampered by prolonged USCG data center setups, virtual machine reliance, and a single-development-environment constraint. This, combined with extended onboarding timelines and an insufficient toolset, severely interfered with modernization initiatives.
The institutional hurdles were technical and organizational in nature; and USCG leadership understood that both required changes for the agency to be more responsive to evolving mission demands.
“One of the major thrusts I have is instituting an agile mindset…how we approach everything, whether it be our own individual work or the greater engineering planning cycles,” explained Mr. Stuart.
The urgent need was a departure from this legacy model to an agile, forward-looking model for rapid adoption of technological advances.
Enter Synergy’s Nautilus Software Factory. Beyond just addressing the bottlenecks of the legacy system, Nautilus, aligned with the DoD DevSecOps Reference Design, emerged as the gold standard for enterprise DevSecOps implementations.
Nautilus ushered in a cloud-first strategy, breaking free from the limitations of the USCG data center and virtual machines. This shift facilitated faster initial setups, agile development, and the rollout of multiple development environments in tandem. Our suite ensured swift resource onboarding and the deployment of a secure, modern toolset tailored to contemporary maritime demands.
The USCG’s transformation has been profound. Embracing the “DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Architecture,” combined with Agile methodologies and USCG SELC adherence, they’ve enhanced their software creation, security, and deployment capabilities. Operational efficiency received a significant boost, with the CI/CD pipeline accelerating ATO approvals.
Now, MVPs see the light of day in 100 days or less, and MVCRs within six months.
