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Secure Platform as a Service at Ministry of Justice

Providing a Secure Platform as a Service to enable Ministry of Justice to accelerate the modernisation of legacy applications to the Public Cloud

“Adopting the Q-Solution PaaS gave us all the necessary security monitoring and network requirements we needed out of the box enabling us to really accelerate the development of the application on AWS.”

Dom Tomkins, Ministry of Justice Service Owner

The Project

The Ministry of Justice were looking to modernise a number of legacy applications and to migrate them into the Cloud. Our AWS based Platform as a Service (PaaS) supported this project by providing the underlying cloud infrastructure, security controls and network connectivity (PSN-P). This allowed them to focus on building the application whilst leaving the infrastructure for us to manage and support 24/7.

The Approach

We worked in partnership with both the Ministry of Justice and their DevOps supplier to provide the initial platform, accounts and guard rails to enable integration with their own CI/CD pipeline. This allowed them to begin early development and proof of concept on the platform

In parallel, we enabled Service Control Policies (SCPs) enforced the collection of logs from the following services:

  • VPC Flowlogs
  • Config
  • GuardDuty
  • CloudWatch
  • Cloud Trail

Providing the customer with our security controls and accreditation, we were able to support them in an early IT Health Check of the application which enabled an accelerated  connection to the secure PSN network.

Finally, in order to support the customers requirement for cyber security visibility, we provided access for approved users to monitor a real-time view of the security posture of their system via our SIEM (Powered by Wiz).

Sample Wiz Dashboard

The Outcomes

The service was transitioned seamlessly in transparently for the end users in 2020 and continues to receive regular changes to improve user experience today.

The customer and supplier are able to receive real-time information on vulnerabilities and, through Wiz, the severity of any findings in the context of the infrastructure and services they have deployed.

The underlying platform is patched daily for security vulnerabilities undergoes annual IT Health Checks as well as being assessed against NIST controls, NCSC Cloud Security Principles and the AWS Well Architected Framework. We also support the customer in providing details to into  their Cyber Assurance Framework (CAF)