Case Study

Secure Cloud Platform for Health Research

Federal health research agency · Google Cloud Platform · NIST 800-53 rev 5 · FISMA Moderate

Client Type
Federal health research agency
Sector
Health research / government
Engagement Model
Project Delivery
Services
Cloud Engineering, DevSecOps

Challenge

The agency required a secure, cloud-based platform to support a large-scale health research initiative. The platform needed to meet strict NIST 800-53 rev 5 and FISMA Moderate security controls, scale reliably under research workloads, and support continuous development without taking production down.

The system had to host sensitive research data, integrate with existing identity infrastructure, and maintain audit-ready evidence at all times. Earlier approaches had stalled when compliance work was bolted on late and slowed delivery to a crawl. The team needed a path that designed compliance into the architecture from week one.

What We Did

We designed and supported a cloud-native platform on Google Cloud Platform with secure serverless infrastructure, automated deployment pipelines, and production-grade operational controls. DevSecOps practices were embedded across the lifecycle so security and compliance moved with development rather than after it.

Identity, access boundaries, network segmentation, encryption, and audit logging were architected to map directly to NIST 800-53 rev 5 controls. Infrastructure as code in Terraform made environments reproducible. CI/CD pipelines enforced policy at deploy time. Observability covered logs, metrics, and traces with alerting tied to operational and compliance signals.

Documentation captured both the architecture and the control mappings, so the audit lifecycle could surface evidence without the team starting from zero each cycle.

Architecture (sanitized)

Secure cloud platform reference architecture on Google Cloud Platform Sanitized reference architecture for a NIST 800-53 rev 5 and FISMA Moderate aligned cloud platform on Google Cloud Platform. External actors authenticate at a Cloud Load Balancer with Identity-Aware Proxy. Inside the compliance boundary a private VPC hosts Cloud Run services for APIs, async workers, and reporting jobs. Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage form the data layer. Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and Secret Manager handle audit and observability. A reviewed CI/CD path deploys into the boundary through tests and policy gates. Researchers Authenticated users Internal Apps Service-to-service Cloud Load Balancer + Identity-Aware Proxy TLS termination · WAF · Federated identity at the edge NIST 800-53 REV 5 · FISMA MODERATE BOUNDARY PRIVATE VPC · LEAST-PRIVILEGE IAM Cloud Run · API Public-path requests Cloud Run · Workers Async processing Cloud Run · Jobs Reporting · scheduled Cloud SQL Encrypted at rest · CMEK Pub/Sub Topics · DLQ on failure Cloud Storage Encrypted artifacts Service-to-service over IAM-bound identities · VPC Service Controls AUDIT & OBSERVABILITY Cloud Logging Centralized audit sink Cloud Monitoring Metrics · SLOs · alerts Secret Manager Encrypted credentials REVIEWED DEPLOY PATH Source repo CI · tests · policy gates Reviewed deploy
Sanitized reference architecture. Production version omits client-identifying naming, specific service-account labels, and exact subnet topology.

Results

  • Delivered a scalable, secure cloud environment meeting NIST 800-53 rev 5 and FISMA Moderate standards, with audit-ready evidence maintained continuously.
  • Improved system stability and operational confidence across the platform, with observability and runbooks covering predictable failure modes.
  • Enabled ongoing development without disrupting production, with deployment pipelines that gave the team daily release cadence inside a regulated environment.
  • Compressed audit cycles by mapping controls to evidence in code, so reviews started from a clear baseline rather than a fresh discovery effort.

Technology Stack

Cloud Google Cloud Platform
Infrastructure as Code Terraform
Compute Cloud Run, serverless workloads
CI/CD Cloud Build, automated promotion across environments
Observability Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, structured tracing
Compliance Frameworks NIST 800-53 rev 5, FISMA Moderate
Identity & Access Federated identity, IAM hardening, least-privilege boundaries
Similar challenge?

Talk to us about your compliance lift.

If you are designing a NIST or FISMA cloud environment, modernizing one that has drifted, or trying to figure out where the gaps are before audit, we'll help you scope the path.

Start a Conversation Cloud Engineering Services