Operation StormBreaker

For nearly 30 years, Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) has been dedicated to its mission of supporting Marines from recruitment through retirement, with a goal of enabling Marines to adapt, thrive and stay mission-ready. To that end, MCCS offers many quality-of-life programs and solutions that are critical to wellness for both Marines and their families.

With such an important mission at stake, MCCS leaders saw the importance of accelerating secure software development to move faster than legacy processes and systems — at true mission speed. Like many in government, MCCS IT teams were dealing with dated, overly complex development processes that often came with months- or years-long timelines, especially when seeking Authority to Operate (ATO) for new solutions and tools.

Operation StormBreaker updated MCCS’ overall development strategies by shifting from traditional waterfall processes to more modern DevSecOps and agile methodologies. The project also introduced a software factory built in a Marine Corps-authorized AWS landing zone with a cloud-native access point. The factory is certified through the Navy’s Rapid Assess and Incorporate Software Engineering (RAISE) framework and built upon an advanced zero trust foundation. 

RAISE “incorporates Agile and DevSecOps principles to streamline and accelerate the RMF process using automation, cyber verification tools, and certified Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure containerized software applications are built, tested, and deployed secure.” It supports the concept of continuous authority to operate, or cATO, through which applications can be assessed and incorporated into an existing ATO rather than requiring their own new ATOs.

In other words, through this combination of strategies, certifications and AWS landing zone, Operation StormBreaker is able to deliver containerized workflows into production with full authorization within minutes. This not only results in major efficiency improvements and time savings but also significantly cuts operational costs associated with traditional ATO delays.

Operation StormBreaker is already earning accolades, including a 2025 Foundry CSO Award, but its successes don’t stop with just one project. If scaled across other departments, it has the potential to introduce the enormous benefits of accelerated cloud-based development and deployment to mission owners throughout the DOD.

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