Past Performance
Expara Systems has delivered as a subcontractor to prime contractors serving the Department of Homeland Security, FDIC, IRS, the Department of Education, and the National Guard Bureau since 2004. Every engagement in the firm's history has been renewed or recompeted successfully. Selected engagements:
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation: Data Orchestration Platform (2023 to present)
Data engineering and security engineering for FDIC's enterprise data lake in Azure. Expara designed and built more than a dozen Azure Data Factory pipelines ingesting API, file-based, and relational sources; co-designed the platform's metadata-driven pipeline architecture; and serves as primary security engineer for the annual NIST SP 800-53 security control assessment. Expara is the most prolific author of the team's documentation, including more than 45 SOPs and the requirements-gathering process. Prime: Karthik Consulting.
Department of Homeland Security: Enterprise Application Hosting and Cloud Migration (2012 to present)
Expara has held incumbent positions on a DHS component agency CIO's operations and solutions delivery contract since 2012 through every recompete, and held the Application Services Branch task lead role from 2016 to 2020, managing a 45-person operations and maintenance organization across platform, middleware, database, cloud, and SharePoint teams hosting 65 enterprise applications. Under Expara's leadership the branch migrated 32 production applications from DHS datacenters to AWS and Azure GovCloud in under ten months, half the allotted time at twice the scope, with no unplanned outages or data loss; adopted DevOps tooling and modernized off WebSphere, Oracle, IBM MQ, and DataPower; and instituted an operating system of 229 SOPs, 85 application design diagrams, and Confluence as the system of record. Prime: ITC Federal.
Department of Homeland Security: ATLAS Datacenter Migration (2011 to 2012)
Planned and managed the relocation of 65 enterprise web applications from a Department of Justice datacenter into two DHS datacenters, including the disaster recovery site. Expara performed requirements analysis on roughly 60 applications, produced the application logical design drawings and communication-channel documentation, defined firewall rules and F5 load-balancing designs for DR failover, and trained and managed the migration engineering team. The program, originally planned for two years, completed in eighteen months, on time and under budget, and the agency CIO recognized the team at its conclusion. Prime: CSRA (now GDIT).
Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration: Technology Infrastructure Modernization (2012 to 2016)
Lead systems engineer and infrastructure architect representing DHS datacenter and cloud services to the TSA TIM program. Expara onboarded the program to DHS cloud services, planned and provisioned more than 425 virtual machines, and wrote the program's infrastructure standard operating policies and procedures and application infrastructure logical designs. Prime: CSC.
Department of Education, Federal Student Aid (2020 to 2022)
Systems architect for the AWS landing-zone General Support System that hosts FSA applications processing IRS federal tax information, owning cost, schedule, and technical performance. Subsequently led the Security Configuration Management team, coordinating fourteen stakeholders to establish and maintain IRS SCSEM and DISA STIG compliance across more than 1,200 assets in AWS and on premises, with automated compliance reporting for the customer.
Internal Revenue Service (2006 to 2011)
Infrastructure engineering lead for the IRS enterprise integration broker, the Account Management System serving 30,000 IRS representatives, and the design and build-out of the New Portal Environment that replaced the IRS public, registered-user, and employee portals.
National Guard Bureau (2002 to 2006)
Executed the DITSCAP certification and accreditation process for two National Guard Bureau enterprise systems, writing the System Security Authorization Agreements and performing all security tests and evaluations, and obtained Authority to Operate for both. Delivered a full-lifecycle document management system.
What our partners say
"Expara Systems has deep experience and working knowledge of cloud and data center migrations, DevSecOps, and Agile based project management. If you need a company that truly understands these concepts as well as people, process, and technology and how to navigate the complexities that often exist between them in order to meet mission success, Expara Systems should be at the top of your list."
Scott Crabb, Senior Solutions Architect, Knight Point Systems, LLC