The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) component is declaring victory in a long technology modernization journey marked by the completion of its transition to modern cloud-based systems.
CBP explained in a recent announcement that the cloud-based systems enable quicker information delivery times and “greater flexibility” to meet “everchanging CBP mission demands,” and follow its retirement at the end of last year of the agency’s Mainframe as a Service infrastructure.
“For nearly six decades, the mainframe era served us well as a foundation for our operations. But technology and our needs have changed,” Troy Miller, the senior official performing the duties of the CBP commissioner, said in a statement earlier this year.
“Our officers and agents and specialists in the field will have better access to information they need – anywhere anytime,” Miller continued.
The legacy mainframe system, first introduced nearly 60 years ago, was the second largest mainframe in the Federal government, trailing only the Social Security Administration. It processed three billion transactions and one trillion database requests each month while it supported over 200,000 devices for CBP, external agencies, and the trade community.
In 2019, CBP transitioned to its cloud-based Mainframe as a Service – later fully retiring that infrastructure replacing it with the rollout of the Automated Commercial Environment Collections Release 7 last November.
“We have worked tirelessly and will continue to do so to make this achievement a reality,” Miller said. “With this transition, we are embarking on a new chapter for CBP, one where we are better positioned to perform our mission of protecting the nation’s borders, its citizens and its economy, now and in the future.”
In 2020, CBP received $15 million from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) which was used to help modernize its Automated Commercial System, which ran on 3.9 million lines of COBOL code. CBP had been working toward the Automated Commercial Environment for two decades, with the project listed as high-risk by Government Accountability Office audits at the time it received TMF funding.
“CBP’s IT enterprise transformation involves strategic transformation, tactical operations excellence, and innovation at the speed of CBP’s 24/7 mission,” commented CBP Chief Information Officer Sonny Bhagowalia.
“This historic milestone embodies the incredible teamwork of all the Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and Industry stakeholders over time using business and IT best practices to meet the mission needs faster, better, more securely, and more affordably,” the CIO said.
