Applied Insight and SHIFT

Applied Insight already had its Altitude Managed Cloud solution when the company acquired Digital Age Experts, who brought their SHIFT solution, an emulation and testing platform for classified and restricted environments. The solution can emulate Amazon Web Services varies cloud regions.

It is an aid for developing and testing commercial software that is being brought into highly secure environments.

One customer is using SHIFT to modernize software development for the F-22 aircraft fleet. With SHIFT, they’ve been able to deploy a new cloud infrastructure across multiple facilities and onboard developers with original equipment manufacturers such as Boeing. Using SHIFT within the development environment, developers are now able to write code in one cloud region and have the assurance that it will function correctly when it is moved to a cloud region of a higher classification level.

By building these configurations on the low-side before SHIFTing them to the high-side, the F-22 Modernization Office has improved deployment cycles, enabled the aircraft fleet to keep pace with its mission, and positioned it for future combat operations.

Speed of development and deployment and security have been major benefits. A study conducted on the F-22 software development efforts found that the average software update took years to release. The Air Force had an immediate need for developers to be able to write cloud-native code that would work on the high-side to accelerate the time to deployment on the aircraft itself. SHIFT has enabled the software developers and infrastructure support engineers to test infrastructure and code before attempting deployment to operational regions. The F-22 program is also using SHIFT as a quality assurance tool.