integrationcomplianceai

Operationalizing AI Platforms After an Acquisition: The BigBear.ai Playbook

UUnknown

2026-02-16

11 min read

Integrate a FedRAMP AI platform fast and safely. Practical checklist for identity, networking, DNS, logging and compliance harmonization.

Hook: Your acquisition unlocked a FedRAMP AI stack — now the hard part begins

Acquiring a FedRAMP-approved AI platform is a strategic win, but for engineering and security teams it immediately raises the stakes: how do you integrate that platform into your org without widening the attack surface, breaking compliance, or creating long-term operational debt? If you’re responsible for identity, networking, DNS, logging, or compliance harmonization after the BigBear.ai-style acquisition, this playbook gives you a practical, prioritised checklist and concrete steps to operationalize the platform in 30/60/90-day sprints.

Executive summary: What success looks like in 90 days

Goal: Deliver a repeatable, auditable integration that preserves the acquired platform’s FedRAMP posture while aligning to your enterprise identity, networking, DNS, logging, and CI/CD/IaC practices.

Top-level acceptance criteria for Day 90:

Users access the acquired platform via your identity provider (SSO, role mapping) with SCIM provisioning for accounts and groups.
Networking and access follow a documented Zero Trust model: private connectivity (VPC endpoints, PrivateLink, or equivalent) and segmented service tiers.
DNS zones are consolidated or delegated with consistent HTTPS/ACME automation and DNSSEC where required.
Logging and telemetry are centralized to your SIEM/Log Archive with immutable retention and FedRAMP-mandated audit trails.
Compliance artifacts are reconciled: authorization boundary updated, continuous monitoring baseline validated, and POA&M items prioritized.

Context you must consider in 2026

Start with the environment: late-2025 and early-2026 trends reshaped acquisitions in the public-sector technology space. Agencies and primes pushed harder on continuous monitoring, supply-chain risk, and explicit Zero Trust controls for cloud-hosted AI. CI/CD pipelines that include policy-as-code (OPA/Rego or Sentinel) and automated security gating became table stakes for FedRAMP Moderate/High workloads. Expect auditors to request evidence of integrated pipelines, automated baseline drift detection, and immutable logs as part of any reauthorization effort.

Operational playbook — roadmap and owner model

Use a RACI-driven plan and break work into three sprints: Stabilize (0–30 days), Integrate (30–60 days), and Harden (60–90 days). Assign an Integration Lead, Compliance Lead, Networking Lead, and Developer Experience Lead. Keep stakeholders (CISO, product owners, contract officers) engaged weekly and publish a living risk register.

Stabilize (0–30 days)

Inventory: catalog all assets, endpoints, service accounts, certificates, and current FedRAMP artifacts (SSP, SAR, POA&M).
Isolation: place the acquired environment into an isolated network context (tag, cloud account, or VPC) to limit blast radius during integration.
Access freeze: require privileged account rotation and enforce MFA on all vendor/supplier accounts.
Baseline logs: ensure audit logging is already enabled and forwarding to an immutable store (if not, configure immediately).

Integrate (30–60 days)

Connect identity: enable SSO, map roles, and automate provisioning via SCIM. Validate session controls and conditional access policies.
Establish private connectivity and DNS delegation strategies; implement tunnel or peering for API calls and data flows.
Plug logs into central SIEM and ensure retention meets your FedRAMP level.
Begin migrating IaC and pipelines into your GitOps flow; run policy-as-code checks for compliance.

Harden (60–90 days)

Finalize authorization boundary updates and submit any required reauthorization artifacts.
Complete end-to-end testing: secops playbooks, incident response runbooks, and forensic collection validation.
Hand over developer workflows with templates, modules, and automated onboarding flows.

Detailed checklist: Identity harmonization

Identity is the single most common failure point in acquisitions. FedRAMP environments require strict identity controls — you must avoid shadow users, stale tokens, and divergent role semantics.

SSO first: Integrate the acquired platform into your enterprise identity provider (IdP) using SAML2.0 or OIDC. For federal customers expect OIDC + PKCE for native apps.
Automate provisioning: Use SCIM for user/group provisioning. Map SCIM attributes to your existing RBAC roles; validate mapping with a staging tenant before bulk provisioning.
Role reconciliation: Perform a gap analysis between the acquired platform’s roles and your organisation’s least-privilege roles. Create crosswalks and limit high-risk roles (admin, owner).
Service accounts & keys: Rotate all service credentials, move secrets into a centralized secrets manager (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault), and enforce short-lived credentials where possible.
Session & conditional access: Enforce MFA, device health checks, and location-based policies. Apply conditional access policies for administrative functions.
Audit trails: Ensure every IdP action (provisioning, deprovisioning, role changes) is logged and forwarded to your SIEM with immutable timestamps.

Networking: Private connectivity and Zero Trust controls

Network-level controls contain data flows and reduce risk. In 2026, the default is Zero Trust: deny-by-default, explicit allow lists, and identity-bound access.

Design the authorization boundary: Decide whether the acquired platform will live in an existing account/VPC or in a dedicated tenant. For FedRAMP, document the boundary in the SSP.
Private endpoints: Prefer cloud provider private connectivity (PrivateLink, Private Service Connect, Private Endpoint) for control-plane APIs and data ingress/egress.
Service segmentation: Segment AI training, inference, and management planes. Apply microsegmentation (NSGs, security groups) and policy enforcement via service mesh where applicable.
Least-privilege network ACLs: Replace broad allow rules with required port/IP pairs and use ephemeral ports for internal services. Implement IDS/IPS monitoring on east-west traffic.
VPN and gateway hardening: Validate VPN termination points, enforce TLS 1.2+ (prefer 1.3), and rotate keys used for tunnels.

DNS harmonization: zones, delegation, and automation

DNS errors lead to outages and authentication failures. Harmonize DNS so your developer and infra tools behave predictably across environments.

Decide on ownership: Either delegate subdomains to the acquired platform (acq.example.com) or import the platform’s zones into your DNS provider — prefer delegation for minimal disruption.
Split-horizon and internal zones: For private endpoints, use split-horizon DNS or private hosted zones to avoid exposing internal hostnames publicly.
Automation with ACME: Integrate certificate issuance via ACME (Let’s Encrypt or internal ACME CA) and automate renewals for service endpoints. Tie issuance to CI/CD workflows for environment promotion.
DNSSEC and validation: Where policy requires, enable DNSSEC and validate delegation chains. Maintain signed records for public-facing endpoints managed by the acquired platform.
Monitoring: Add DNS health checks and TTL-aware failover for critical API endpoints. Log DNS queries for anomaly detection and forensic needs.

Logging & observability: centralization and immutability

FedRAMP auditors care about audit trails. Your integration must guarantee that logs are complete, tamper-evident, and retained according to policy.

Central ingestion: Configure the acquired platform to forward system, application, and access logs to your central log collector (SIEM, ELK, Splunk). Use secure, authenticated transport (TLS + mutual TLS where possible).
Retention & immutability: Archive logs to immutable storage (WORM buckets or write-once storage) with retention aligned to the FedRAMP level and agency policy. See storage tradeoffs in edge and object storage.
Normalized schemas: Normalize log schema to your observability model (timestamps in UTC, consistent field names for user ids, session ids, request ids) to enable cross-system correlation.
Alerting & runbooks: Define alert thresholds and attach runbooks for incident response. Validate alerts in the first 60 days using simulated events.
Telemetry for AI pipelines: Instrument model training and inference with provenance metadata (dataset identifiers, model version, parameters) for reproducibility and governance.

Compliance harmonization: FedRAMP artifacts and continuous monitoring

Reusing the acquired platform’s FedRAMP stamp is tempting, but you must verify the authorization boundary and controls. Expect reviewers to examine the integration rigorously.

SSP & boundary update: Update the System Security Plan (SSP) to include newly integrated services, new connectivity, and change-control processes.
Continuous monitoring: Ensure your CM tools ingest the acquired platform’s telemetry and that SCAP/endpoint agents are in place where required. Tie drift detection to alerts and automatic remediation playbooks.
POA&M alignment: Merge outstanding POA&M items and assign remediation owners with dates. Prioritize items that affect authorization decisions.
Supply-chain evidence: Inventory third-party components (open-source, external APIs) in the acquired platform and map them to your SBOM policy. Conduct a vulnerability scan across components and images.
Reauthorization trigger plan: If the integration materially changes the boundary, plan for reauthorization. Prepare evidence for control implementations and test results from CI/CD gates.

CI/CD, IaC and developer workflows

Successful integrations don't stunt developer velocity. Bake in gating, policy checks, and reusable modules so teams can deploy safely.

GitOps baseline: Bring the acquired platform’s IaC into your GitOps model. Create a repository structure that separates environment overlays (dev/stage/prod) and apply branch protections.
Reusable IaC modules: Extract network, DNS, identity, and logging templates into shared Terraform/ARM/Bicep modules. Standardize naming, tagging, and policy attachments.
Policy-as-code: Integrate OPA/Rego policies or Sentinel checks into CI to reject changes that violate least privilege, open network access, or missing logging configuration. See more on automating compliance checks in CI pipelines.
Pipeline integration: Add SAST, dependency scanning, SBOM generation, and container image signing to CI. Promote artifacts only when all checks pass and attestations are attached.
Secrets & signing: Enforce secrets not in code. Use CI-native secret injection and require signed artifacts for deployment into production-like environments.

Developer onboarding and runbooks

Make it painless for engineers to work with the new platform while preserving controls.

Onboarding checklist: Provide a template that includes: IdP access instructions, required permissions, local dev credentials, network access, logging endpoints, and CI repo links.
Reference modules and samples: Publish example IaC for common tasks: provisioning a model endpoint, configuring logging, or issuing TLS certs via ACME.
Runbooks: Ship incident and operational runbooks for common scenarios (failed training jobs, certificate expiry, degraded inference latency). Test runbooks in tabletop exercises.

Testing matrix and validation

Before full cutover, validate both technical and compliance aspects with a structured test matrix.

Identity: Confirm SCIM provisioning, SAML/OIDC login flows, session revocation, and MFA enforcement.
Network: Validate private endpoint accessibility, segmentation, and failover behavior.
DNS: Test delegation, resolution across split-horizon, and TLS cert issuance automation.
Logging: Inject test events and verify end-to-end ingestion, retention, and alerting.
Compliance: Run an internal control review and evidence collection against the SSP; simulate an audit request.

Common pitfalls and mitigations

Pitfall: Blindly adopting the acquired platform’s identity model. Mitigation: Map roles and use short-lived links until provisioning is harmonized.
Pitfall: Exposing management APIs during DNS migration. Mitigation: Use private endpoints and enforce allow lists for management operations.
Pitfall: Losing audit context after log centralization. Mitigation: Preserve original log meta, add cross-system correlation IDs, and validate retention policies.
Pitfall: Rushed reauthorization without full evidence. Mitigation: Stage a limited scope reauthorization for critical pieces and expand after integration.

Case example: 90-day checklist applied (compact)

Example timeline for a medium-size enterprise integrating an acquired FedRAMP AI platform:

Days 0–7: Run a fast inventory and isolate environment. Rotate credentials and enable MFA.
Days 8–21: Enable SSO and SCIM in a staging tenant. Configure private endpoints for control plane traffic.
Days 22–45: Migrate DNS via delegation, centralize logs into SIEM with immutable store, and import IaC into GitOps repo.
Days 46–75: Implement OPA policies in CI, test incident runbooks, run internal control validation, and merge POA&M items.
Days 76–90: Finalize SSP updates, submit reauthorization evidence if required, and hand over developer onboarding resources.

Tools and integrations checklist

Pick tools that map to your environment. Common choices in 2026:

Identity: Okta, Azure AD (Entra), PingID, custom OIDC IdP
Secrets: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault
Network: Cloud provider PrivateLink/Private Endpoint, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), firewall automation
DNS: Route 53/Cloud DNS/Traffic Manager + PowerDNS for internal zones
CI/CD & IaC: GitHub Actions/GitLab/GCP Cloud Build + Terraform/CloudFormation/ARM + OPA/Rego or Sentinel
Logging & SIEM: Splunk, Elastic, Datadog, or cloud-native Lakehouse + WORM object storage
Compliance: Continuous monitoring tools, SBOM scanners, automated evidence collectors

Final takeaways — prioritized actions you can start now

Day 0–3: Inventory, isolate, rotate credentials, enable MFA.
Week 1: Configure SSO stub and collect existing SSP/SAR/POA&M artifacts.
Week 2–4: Centralize logs, set up private connectivity, and plan DNS delegation.
Week 4–8: Import IaC to GitOps, implement policy-as-code, and automate CI gates.
Week 8–12: Validate controls end-to-end, update authorization boundary, and engage auditors if needed.

“Operational harmonization after acquiring a FedRAMP AI platform is less about flipping a switch and more about aligning identity, network, DNS and telemetry to a single source of truth.”

Closing: your next steps

Acquiring a FedRAMP AI platform can accelerate product and market capability, but integration missteps increase risk and cost. Use this playbook to create a prioritized, auditable path from acquisition to operational parity with your enterprise controls. Start with identity and logging — they unlock the rest of the integration and provide audit evidence quickly.

If you want a tailored runbook, reach out for a 30-minute integration scoping session and a customized 90-day sprint plan aligned to your compliance level and cloud footprint.

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