Case Study
Designing secure cloud foundations for regulated workloads
Fairbanks Morse Defense
Role
AWS Solutions Architect
Period
September 2020 – March 2023
Duration
2.5 years
Industry
Defense and regulated workloads
The Problem
Fairbanks Morse Defense needed AWS environments for workloads with different data classifications and compliance requirements across Commercial and GovCloud regions.
The organization needed a clear account model, network boundaries, identity controls, centralized monitoring, and infrastructure practices that could support migration without weakening security or slowing operations.
Why It Mattered
The challenge was to make security and governance part of the cloud foundation, while giving delivery and operations teams a repeatable way to provision and manage environments. Ken’s role centered on architecture, automation patterns, review, and technical guidance.
What Ken Did
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Designed the multi-account cloud structure. Defined separate production, non-production, security tooling, and shared-services accounts, account vending, and cross-account access patterns.
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Designed security and identity controls. Established least-privilege IAM, MFA, STS credential patterns, Okta federation, and workload placement based on data classification.
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Planned multi-region networking. Designed VPC topology, Transit Gateway connectivity, Direct Connect, segmentation, and remote-access patterns.
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Defined governance and monitoring guardrails. Designed AWS Organizations, Service Control Policies, Config, StackSets, Security Hub, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, centralized logs, and remediation workflows.
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Established infrastructure and migration patterns. Set Terraform and Ansible approaches, infrastructure CI/CD controls, phased migration patterns, Well-Architected reviews, and operational knowledge-transfer practices.
What Changed
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A multi-account foundation established a basis for workloads across AWS Commercial and GovCloud.
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Security, governance, and monitoring requirements were translated into architecture and operating patterns.
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Infrastructure automation and migration sequencing gave teams a repeatable path for future workloads.
What Continued Afterward
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Multi-account and multi-region architecture patterns
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Identity, network, governance, and monitoring design
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Terraform and Ansible infrastructure automation practices
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Migration and remediation roadmap with operational documentation
Tools Behind the Work
Need secure cloud architecture that can support delivery?
Bring the business problem or contract requirement. We can discuss what needs to change, what the work requires, and whether my experience fits.