MongoDB and Clarity Business Solutions: Enabling Modernization for Public Sector Clients

Cloud-based transformation is now a must-have for federal agencies. And, in partnership with Clarity Business Solutions, MongoDB is making that transformation easier for government agencies, particularly those that work in closed, air-gapped environments and that require security clearances for their support staff. In this article, we’ll look at specific ways MongoDB and Clarity Business Solutions are working together to support public sector clients.

Cloud challenges

IT teams within government agencies want many of the same cloud benefits that their colleagues in the private sector enjoy: better performance, the ability to outsource the management of their infrastructure, and a path to building more resilient applications.

And government leaders, at the national level, are pushing for more cloud adoption. A May 2021 executive order from President Joe Biden called on all federal agencies to “accelerate movement to secure cloud services.” In the mission to support U.S. troops, Danielle Metz, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Deputy CIO for Information Enterprise, said, “It all comes down to harnessing the power of cloud compute and then being able to natively build applications continuously and often in that space.”

For government agencies, security is an overriding concern. However, some of the precautions that enable the highest levels of security also make it more difficult to keep applications up to date, to modernize them, and to move them to the cloud.

Government agencies often work in closed networks, without access to the internet. The need for security clearances makes it difficult for agencies to take advantage of support from software companies, consultants, and other members of the technology ecosystem. Even personnel with appropriate security clearances aren’t always allowed to go on-site to assist their government clients.

These extra layers of security can also make it difficult for MongoDB to support public sector clients that require top secret clearances. Now, we’re pleased to announce that our ability to service these clients has been enhanced through our partnership with Clarity Business Solutions, a software and systems engineering company that focuses on data analytics, processing, and data flow.

Clarity specializes in working with the federal government and understands the constraints under which government agencies operate — as well as the requisition procedures and security protocols unique to the federal government. The company has experience working in closed, air-gapped environments, and all but two of Clarity’s employees hold security clearances.

Joint solutions

In the first phase of our partnership, MongoDB and Clarity are jointly offering three unique solutions to better support our public sector clients:

• Application modernization

• Government Support

• Rapid start

Let’s look at each of these solutions in turn.

Application modernization

Together, Clarity and MongoDB offer public sector clients a proven, iterative approach to application modernization. Clarity’s security clearances allow them to sit side-by-side with public sector clients when necessary, and Clarity has deep experience with the environments common to government agencies.

• Clarity and MongoDB leverage a strategic process for analyzing legacy applications and modernizing and migrating them iteratively, rather than trying to update an entire system in a “big bang” approach.

• This iterative approach allows clients to modernize without downtime.

• Legacy and modernized systems can run in parallel for a period of time, enabling troubleshooting and increasing confidence.

• Clarity and MongoDB combine the power of the MongoDB developer data platform with Clarity’s extensive client domain knowledge. This partnership allows teams to focus on the application feature development and quickly get the data platform operational.

Public sector clients often operate systems with significant accumulated technical debt. Clarity and MongoDB are partnering to help clients increase efficiency, improve performance and scalability, and optimize maintenance as each monolithic application is modernized, rather than waiting years for an entire system to be replaced.

Government support

MongoDB and Clarity Business Solutions are offering a concierge support service specifically for the public sector.

• Government Support engages U.S.-only technical staff, with appropriate clearances, to provide phone, online, or even on-site support for MongoDB government customers.

• Government Tier Support provides continuity between call-in support and support offered by individuals with on-site clearance.

• Clarity Government Support engineers are tightly integrated with the MongoDB support team and can rely on the expertise of the broader MongoDB engineering organization while ensuring that all necessary details remain confidential.

• Service-level agreements are twice the MongoDB published response times for commercial support.

Rapid start

This new service helps public sector clients get operational with MongoDB as quickly and efficiently as possible. This intense, short engagement ensures the following:

• Networking layouts are optimized and secured using appropriate firewall rules and TLS to encrypt all data in transit.

• Data storage is set up to meet applications’ needs.

• Backup and recovery are properly enabled.

• Agencies have the proper guidance to achieve environment security requirements. For example, data at rest is encrypted according to client requirements through disk encryption and/or MongoDB’s encrypted storage engine. Data in use can be protected with client-side field-level encryption.

Additionally, Clarity engineers can consult and provide input on schema design, leveraging key MongoDB features and working with training staff on the best practices for using MongoDB.

We believe these three new offerings will significantly ease the way for our government clients, enabling them to make the best use of MongoDB and cloud technologies and to better serve their end customer — all of us.