DEVOPS & ENGINEERING PRACTICES
DEVOPS & ENGINEERING PRACTICES
Avalon retires your riskiest legacy systems in funded, low-risk increments, and measures success by systems actually turned off, not by hours billed.
Avalon inventories an agency's aging systems, decides which to keep, fix, replace, or retire, and executes that plan in increments small enough that the mission never has to hold its breath.
THE PROBLEM & THE APPROACH
The Challenge
Our Approach
Agencies have typically reported spending roughly 80% of IT budgets just operating and maintaining systems GAO has flagged as 23 to 59 years old, leaving nothing for new capability.
Avalon inventories the portfolio, scores technical debt and risk, and assigns every in-scope system an explicit keep/fix/replace/retire disposition, with the reasoning documented, before any build work starts.
Unsupported operating systems and unpatchable components generate POA&M items that cannot be closed, degrading the system's authorization posture and drawing IG and FISMA audit findings.
Avalon assesses the authorization impact of every modernization move up front, documenting boundary changes as increments are built rather than discovering them at cutover.
Federal modernizations have a documented failure pattern, GAO found only three of the ten most critical legacy systems it flagged in 2019 had been modernized by 2025, usually multi-year, big-bang rewrites with no working software until the end.
Avalon executes in 8–12 week increments using strangler-fig and event-interception patterns, each ending in deployed, working capability, with a kill-switch decision point the agency controls at every boundary.
Systems written in COBOL, assembly, and other aging languages depend on a shrinking pool of people, and one-year appropriations reward keeping the lights on over capital replacement.
Avalon builds the funding strategy, working capital fund options, TMF proposal support, directly into the roadmap, and treats decommissioning, not hours billed, as the contract deliverable.
CORE CAPABILITIES
Every system in scope gets an explicit, defensible disposition before any build work starts.
Working capability delivered every 8–12 weeks, never a multi-year bet on a single cutover.
The engagement isn't complete until legacy systems are verifiably turned off and the savings documented.
OUR PROCESS
Kickoff, security paperwork, badging/PIV, network accounts, tool access, and the data call issued. (Weeks 0–4, agency-dependent)
Inventory, dependency mapping, stakeholder interviews, code and architecture analysis, and risk scoring. (Weeks 2–10)
Disposition matrix, target architecture, increment plan, funding strategy, and an executive readout. (Weeks 8–14)
One bounded system modernized end-to-end, including pipeline, tests, and security artifact updates. (Weeks 14–28)
Repeating 8–12 week increments across the roadmap, each ending in deployed, working capability. (Months 7–30, scope-dependent)
Data migration, parallel run where needed, cutover, legacy retirement, and savings verification. (4–8 weeks per retired system)
WHY AVALON
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Federal Frameworks Addressed
No Incentive to Keep Legacy Alive
Large integrators monetize the O&M tail; a modernization that truly retires systems shrinks their revenue. Avalon's engagement model treats decommissioning as the deliverable and prices assessments fixed-price, there is no incentive to keep legacy alive.
Avalon's revenue doesn't depend on systems staying alive, decommissioning is the contract deliverable, not an afterthought.
Avalon's Authorization & Accreditation catalog means authorization impact is engineered into every increment, not discovered at cutover.
Avalon's FinOps forensic-audit heritage closes engagements with auditable decommission numbers, not vibes.
Founder-level engineers deliver working capability every 8–12 weeks, rather than betting everything on a multi-year cutover.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
Straight answers about scope, risk, and what a modernization engagement will, and won't, get you.
Talk to Our Team →5
Federal Frameworks Addressed
Avalon doesn't propose to swallow it whole. We size increments to what we can staff with senior people, deliver working capability every 8–12 weeks, and you own the roadmap and the code regardless. If the program outgrows us, the roadmap makes any follow-on vendor's job cheaper, and for genuinely enterprise-scale execution we team and say so up front.
For this specific service, that's accurate today, and Avalon won't dress it up. FAR 15.305(a)(2)(iv) requires that an offeror without a record of relevant past performance be rated neutrally, not unfavorably, on that factor. A fixed-price assessment under the Simplified Acquisition Threshold is a low-risk way to build the record together.
They do, and the incumbent's economics reward keeping that system running. An independent disposition analysis costs a fraction of one year of the O&M line and gives you leverage either way: it validates the incumbent's plan or exposes what it protects. Our strangler-pattern approach also doesn't require discarding incumbent knowledge, we document it as we intercept it.
You're already spending the modernization budget, on O&M. The assessment is priced under the simplified acquisition threshold so it can be bought with year-end funds, and its deliverables include the funding strategy: working capital fund options, TMF proposal support, and a decommission-savings case your CFO can take to the budget process.
Unmanaged, it can. That's why authorization-impact analysis precedes every increment, boundary changes are documented as we build, and Avalon's catalog includes the SSP, POA&M, and ATO-facilitation work to keep your assessors ahead of the change rather than behind it. Your Authorizing Official stays in control throughout.
No. Rehosting is one disposition among seven in the TIME/6R framework. Moving a broken system to the cloud produces an expensive broken system, the disposition analysis decides what actually fits each system, not a default answer.
No, and anyone who does before seeing your estate is selling, not assessing. Savings are verified after decommissioning against a documented baseline, not promised up front, that's what makes the decommission report defensible to your CFO and to oversight.
Talk to Avalon about a Legacy Risk & Modernization Readiness Assessment for your portfolio.