How Second Front Game Warden enables classified workloads on AWS

By Dylan Sims, Director of Solutions Engineering – Second Front
By Vin Minichino, Senior Solutions Architect – AWS
By Tom Diepenbrock, Senior Solutions Architect – AWS

Governments and defense agencies are challenged to deploy and manage mission-critical workloads in classified environments. Second Front’s Game Warden is at the forefront of this mission, offering robust solutions for deploying classified and regulated applications. Former military and civilian experts with deep expertise created Game Warden in cybersecurity and enterprise technology.

This blog explores how Game Warden supports these high-security operations, ensuring compliance and efficiency.

Operational Barriers

Operating and delivering mission-critical software in classified environments is one of the most complex challenges facing modern defense and intelligence organizations. Secret and Top Secret national security operations need technology that functions securely; however, various technical, regulatory, customer, and operational challenges complicate deploying workloads, security, and continuous management.

For software vendors and technology providers, this challenge is even more daunting. To bring applications into classified domains, companies often face:

• Rigid security compliance frameworks
• Requirements for cleared personnel and facility clearances
• Lengthy authority to operate (ATO) processes
• The need to integrate with tightly controlled government networks

These hurdles create friction and cost, preventing innovative software from rapidly reaching the operators and analysts who need it most.

Defense agencies and mission partners face increasing pressure to modernize and leverage cloud-native capabilities. However, operating at classified levels requires both compliant infrastructure and a platform that can abstract the complexity of deployments, sustain continuous delivery, and enforce strict security controls without slowing down operational tempo.

2F Game Warden

Second Front System’s Game Warden platform was purpose-built to solve these challenges. Designed by former military cyber operators and federal technology leaders, Game Warden removes the traditional obstacles to deploying software in classified environments. The platform accelerates access to cloud-native applications and enables regulated workloads to operate securely at any classification level, including in AWS’ classified regions. By leveraging Game Warden, software publishers can streamline securing and managing their applications, ensuring they meet stringent government regulations and security standards.

The platform provides an end-to-end solution that simplifies the complex requirements associated with classified data handling, cross-domain solutions, and platform administration making it an invaluable tool for national security operations. Game Warden uses AWS services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Amazon Simple Queue Service. With this Game Warden ensures a robust and scalable cloud infrastructure as shown in Figure 1.

AWS provides the underlying cloud services, while Game Warden layers on the compliance and security controls tailored for government use.

For a deeper dive into the architecture and how Game Warden enables secure SaaS delivery onto DoD networks, read Accelerate SaaS Delivery onto DoD Networks with Game Warden.

Understanding Security Classifications

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) is the Department of Defense’s multi-cloud procurement initiative awarded in 2022 to major cloud providers, including AWS. This initiative delivers secure, enterprise-scale cloud services across all classification levels, as seen in Figure 2. JWCC improves on earlier pacts like C2S (Commercial Cloud Services), given to AWS in 2013 for cloud computing for the U.S. intelligence community, as well as C2E (Commercial Cloud Enterprise), awarded in 2020 to enlarge cloud services to intelligence agencies with a greater number of suppliers.

Game Warden leverages the secure infrastructure made accessible through these contract vehicles to enable software deployment across unclassified and classified AWS regions. Gaining access to classified networks is difficult because of requirements like US citizenship, cleared engineers, and a federal contract. By using Game Warden as their secure hosting platform, software vendors can alleviate many of these barriers to entry, shifting the focus back to delivering advanced war-fighting capabilities.

To learn more about DoD Compliance, visit our Understanding DoD Cloud Computing Impact Levels page

How Game Warden Works

Tailored Deployment Capabilities: Software vendors under contract with a federal agency can leverage Game Warden to facilitate the deployment of applications across different security levels, from unclassified (low) to classified environments and networks. This feature enables secure application elevation, to the required classification level, without risking data integrity or security. This provides a pathway for vendors to leverage Second Front’s robust inherited security controls in Game Warden to deploy software updates to classified environments continuously.

Security Measures: Game Warden automates compliance checks and enforces security protocols to ensure applications meet the required standards for classified data handling. This is accomplished by incorporating security and compliance checks into each software lifecycle stage, covering container scans, infrastructure-as-code linting, automated STIG validation, and enforcing basic configuration controls. Game Warden continuously monitors deployed applications using a combination of static and dynamic analysis tools, vulnerability scanners, and behavioral monitoring agents. If a finding exceeds the agency’s predefined risk acceptance thresholds, Game Warden can automatically block deployment or initiate a rollback, ensuring that non-compliant software is never promoted to a live classified environment. This enforcement capability is central to maintaining zero trust principles and sustaining compliant authorizations across mission workloads.

Tailored and Inherited Compliance: Customers operating on Game Warden benefit from inherited compliance with most frameworks applicable to classified workloads. Besides these baseline controls, Game Warden allows customers to tailor specific compliance requirements to meet unique organizational or mission-specific needs. This includes adjusting control implementations, setting custom risk thresholds, and integrating additional security checks or policy enforcements. These tailored controls are enforced through the platform’s policy engine and continuous monitoring pipelines as shown in Figure 3. This enables flexibility without compromising accreditation or operational security.

Supported DoD compliance frameworks include DoD CC SRG, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-171, 800-53, Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks, DoD DevSecOps Reference Architecture, and Secure Technical Implementation Guides (STIGS).

Conclusion

Game Warden on AWS’s classified regions represents an advancement in the secure deployment and management of classified workloads. Federal and defense agencies can use the cloud safely with Game Warden’s complete solution for the unique problems of managing classified data. As the need for secure cloud solutions continues to grow, Game Warden stands out as a critical asset in safeguarding national security interests. To learn more about the specifics of how Game Warden operates on AWS, check out our other AWS blog post. Also read how Learn To Win deployed workloads at Impact Level 6 with Game Warden.

To learn how Game Warden boosts software delivery for your organization, reach out to Second Front Systems.
.
.

Second Front – AWS Partner Spotlight

Second Front is an AWS Partner that helps organizations streamline software delivery with its fully managed and compliance DevSecOps platform Game Warden.

Contact Second Front Systems | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace