Strongbridge
Cloud-Native Development to Enhance Capabilities

Today, governments struggle to reign in expenditures and are focused more towards sustaining costs for their IT portfolios. The low, published unit costs for deploying systems into cloud infrastructures is offering a solution to the public sector. However, as federal clients move towards cloud computing, most of them are unable to realize the full potential of cloud because they are bringing their legacy architectures and designs to the modern cloud. Virginia based Strongbridge is offering the public sector a different approach–cloud-native development. The company has for a long-time been a successful Agile developer across a large group of federal clients, and have taken Agile expertise and applied it to developing applications that reside natively and optimally in cloud computing ecosystems.

According to Anthony Schulien, President of Strongbridge, public sector CIOs have to balance new requirements and the funding and resources to create new capabilities, with the ongoing maintenance tail of the systems they have put in place over the past decade. “We apply Agile methods and cloud-native development methods to reduce ongoing costs and enhance capabilities. In fact our Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), Geoff Raines was the author of the paper ‘Cloud Computing in Federal Environments’ which was cited as a government resource for those early adopters moving to cloud computing environments.”

Strongbridge specializes in applying Agile expertise and solutions in cloud-based computing environments, web development, big data collection and analytics, systems engineering, and infrastructure support. “Our goal is that our clients will realize cost savings and better productivity by using Strongbridge’s solutions for native cloud development, and by taking full advantage of the additional services continuously being fielded by cloud service providers,” says Jeff Powell, CEO, Strongbridge.

In an implementation highlight, Strongbridge’s staff successfully moved NHTSA’s Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) Lookup Service to the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud for use by the public on a nationwide scale. The VIN Lookup Service facilitates members of the public to search their vehicles and discover information on any recalls that exist from the vehicle manufacturers.

Our strategy is to offer the highest confidence software development services for the runtime environments that our customers live in, both today and tomorrow

As a result of the transformation and inherent benefits in the cloud, the system’s presentation layer now has automation to match IT resources to changes in user demand.

One of Strongbridge’s important differentiators is being able to define cloud-native architectures that are neutral to particular vendors, supporting true portability, and competition among providers. “One of the risks for a government effort is to get ‘locked in’ to one cloud ecosystem and not to be able to competitively take advantage of the changing service provider costs and capabilities in the marketplace,” states CSO Geoff Raines. Strongbridge helps build systems from the start to have that kind of portability by using CMMI Level 3 DEV processes. The company has invested and developed their Quality Management System (QMS) with ISO 9001:2015 certification; their IT Service Management processes are ISO 20000-1:2011 certified; and Security Management processes are ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified. These certifications provide assurance that Strongbridge’s management and technical processes are documented and audited, and continuously being enhanced.

Strongbridge guided by their steadfast leadership will continue to invest in staff expertise, partnerships, and corporate certifications that lay the foundation for growth. “Our strategy is to offer the highest confidence software development services for the runtime environments that our customers live in, both today and tomorrow,” affirms Schulien. “This means that cloud ecosystems will play an increasing role in our public sector contract base, and we will lead the way in leveraging cloud services to reduce our customer’s long term costs.”