Leading Enterprise Cloud Migration at CMS: A CTO’s Perspective

As the Chief Technology Officer of Leidos’ CMS division from 2020 to 2023, I had a front-row seat to one of the most consequential modernization initiatives in federal health IT: moving the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ enterprise systems into the cloud, rethinking decades-old architectures, and building a foundation for resilient, secure, scalable digital services.

In early 2023, Leidos announced new contracts to support CMS’ Office of Information Technology (OIT) and Infrastructure and User Services Group (IUSG). These awards — part of a broader suite of work worth approximately $102 million — reflected CMS’ commitment to accelerate onboarding, migration planning, hybrid cloud operations, and modernization of mission-critical applications.

“Building off our expertise in IT modernization, Leidos will deliver key foundational services for CMS OIT and support their evolving needs,” said Liz Porter, President of Leidos’ Health Group, in response to the 2023 awards.

Those awards provided the contractual framework for the work I led: developing and executing a cloud migration strategy for over 200 applications spread across six data centers. This wasn’t simply a technology migration — it was a coordinated enterprise transformation where architecture, change management, and mission continuity had to be tightly aligned.

Cloud Strategy Built Around Mission

CMS operates an extraordinarily complex portfolio: claims processing, eligibility systems, analytics platforms, provider interfaces — and all under strict requirements for security, compliance, uptime, and performance. Cloud modernization at this scale demanded three strategic pillars:

1. Application Portfolio Modernization and Sequencing
Rather than attempting a giant “lift and shift,” we broke the portfolio into phases based on technical complexity, compliance profile, and business dependencies. This ensured that early migrations built confidence and operational maturity before tackling the most complex workloads.

2. Hybrid Cloud Architecture with Governance
CMS required a hybrid model that balanced cloud scale with regulatory compliance and operational realities. Enterprise architecture reviews, shared standards, and repeatable reference designs were critical so that every partner team — whether internal or contractor — could operate from the same blueprint.

3. Change Management and Workforce Enablement
Migration isn’t just about technology — it’s about people. Development teams, operations staff, and agency stakeholders needed training, new operational processes, and clear expectations. We embedded change management into each migration wave to reduce friction and build cloud expertise across the organization.

Cloud transformation at this scale demanded coordination across dozens of partner agencies, technology teams, enterprise architects, and contractors — and it demanded that every one of us keep mission continuity at the forefront.

CMS Modernization Contracts as Context

The 2023 CMS contract awards provided essential runway for ongoing modernization work. Under that prime contract, Leidos supported key aspects of cloud onboarding and enterprise operations, helping CMS migrate existing workload environments to hybrid cloud platforms while maintaining secure, reliable service delivery.

Leidos’ work at CMS also intersected with other modernization tasks, such as support for CMS’ National Data Warehouse (NDW) services — an effort underwriting analytics and reporting across the agency’s massive data ecosystem. One task order awarded in 2023 reflected roughly $53 million in support services for CMS NDW operations, underscoring the broader modernization landscape in which cloud migration was embedded.

Although media coverage of these contracts tended to highlight executive leadership and award values, behind the scenes the work we executed as a division was all about mission continuity, architectural discipline, and accountability at enterprise scale.

Delivering Measurable Impact

By the time I completed my tenure in 2023, we had laid the technical and operational groundwork for a true enterprise cloud environment:

• Applications running in hybrid cloud with improved uptime and resilience

• Shared security controls and compliance guardrails that supported federal requirements

• Operational tooling that enabled faster deployments, better monitoring, and more predictable change outcomes

• A scalable foundation that allowed CMS to explore data interoperability and analytics initiatives at scale

Cloud modernization was never an end in itself — it was a platform for accelerating CMS’ mission, enabling the agency to continue its core work supporting Medicare, Medicaid, and marketplace programs with greater agility, reliability, and future-ready infrastructure.