District of Columbia’s Health Benefits Exchange (HBX) chose to move to the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it offers the ability to develop software and new features rapidly, meet federal security and compliance standards, and contain costs. HBX uses a variety of AWS services, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for secure file storage, Amazon Macie for data-security services, Amazon Route 53 for Domain Name System (DNS) service, AWS CloudFormation for cloud service provisioning, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for database services. HBX also takes advantage of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling, which enables HBX to quickly scale computing capacity to meet changes in demand while only paying for what it uses. AWS Service Catalog gives the organization centralized control over cloud configurations, which can be quickly deployed for different users.

stackArmor was responsible for the migration, compliance and web hosting of the District of Columbia’s Health Benefits Exchange on AWS in compliance with CMS MARS E 2.0 security standards. The website hosts seasonal enrollment loads and requires regular hardening and security scanning. stackArmor migrated the site and provides management and support services with strong performance and integrity requirements commensurate with a government healthcare website.

Specific services provided by srackArmor’s cloud security and compliance experts include:

– Authority To Operate (ATO) in compliance with MARS-E 2.0

– Website hosting and management on AWS

– Patching and vulnerability management

– Security incident and event monitoring

– SSL certificate installation

– Continuous monitoring and reporting

stackArmor provided streamlined acquisition support providing AWS-compatible, third-party software, and tools through the AWS Marketplace. stackArmor installed and deployed the stackArmor ThreatAlert and OpsAlert solution to help DC-HBX manage and maintain security operations and financial oversight. Read more about the DC-HBX project on the AWS website.