Capabilities

Enterprise Cybersecurity Operations • Identity, Credential & Access Management (ICAM) • Secure Cloud & Directory Integration • Compliance, Controls & Risk Reduction

Mission Context

The NOAA Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) is responsible for NOAA’s enterprise IT resources, including email, calendar, web hosting, administrative computing, networking, security monitoring, and security incident response. NOAA’s enterprise environment supports weather forecasting, ocean and coastal monitoring, satellite systems, and scientific research—all of which depend on secure, reliable access to systems and data. In this context, ICAM is foundational to protecting mission-critical resources while enabling seamless service delivery at scale.

Objective

Support NOAA OCIO’s enterprise ICAM environment by ensuring secure, reliable access to systems and applications, strengthening identity assurance, improving operational resilience, and maintaining compliance with federal cybersecurity requirements.

@Orchard Solution

As prime contractor, @Orchard supported NOAA OCIO’s enterprise ICAM services with an integrated approach spanning operations, engineering, and compliance support. Our work focused on the systems and processes that determine who can access NOAA resources, what they can access, and how that access is securely verified—across cloud and on-premises platforms and across a broad enterprise footprint.

@Orchard supported a geographically distributed, highly available architecture designed with no single point of failure, helping ensure operational continuity under real-world conditions. We helped operate and mature core ICAM capabilities—including directory services, secure single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), federated sign-on, credential lifecycle workflows, and PKI/certificate validation—enabling secure access across platforms and devices.

In parallel, @Orchard strengthened NOAA’s cybersecurity posture through controls-driven execution aligned to federal and departmental expectations, including continuous monitoring and security engineering. We also contributed secure integration support for cloud and directory environments, maintained enterprise directory services, and developed practical enablement assets (documentation, primers) to support adoption and consistent use of secure access services across the organization.

Impact

This work strengthened an enterprise access foundation NOAA relies on every day to support mission-critical operations. At scale, the ICAM environment includes approximately 45,000 managed objects, 20,000+ certificates, and high-volume validation activity—including 15.3M certificate validation requests in a single month and ~1,000 authentications per minute at peak business hours. By improving reliability, reinforcing identity controls, and supporting secure modernization, @Orchard helped reduce access-related cyber risk while enabling NOAA teams to do their work without disruption. The result is an access environment that protects sensitive systems and data while sustaining operational continuity—secure, consistent, and at national scale.