Lightedge Helps BL Harbert International Build Anything, Powered by AWS

BL Harbert International is a privately owned construction company headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, with operations spanning the globe. The company delivers pre-construction, construction, design-build, and construction management services to both domestic and international clients across virtually every construction market segment.

Core to BL Harbert’s operational model is a decentralized management philosophy, which has resulted in two distinct business units: the U.S. Construction Group and the International Construction Group. With approximately 98% of its international division’s revenue tied to U.S. federal government contracts, compliance and data security are not optional; they are fundamental to how the company operates.

The Challenge

Outgrowing Previous MSP: Compliance, Cost, and Cloud Complexity

While BL Harbert made the strategic decision to shift from on-premises data centers and migrate its infrastructure to AWS, this modernization introduced new complexity. As a federal contractor, BL Harbert operates under a demanding set of regulatory requirements, and its AWS environment needed to reflect that. Its previous managed services provider could not keep pace, which led BL Harbert to Lightedge.

The gaps were clear: limited compliance expertise, inadequate visibility into AWS spend, and insufficient resources to manage and secure a growing cloud environment. BL Harbert needed a new MSP that could bring both deep AWS knowledge and demonstrated fluency in federal compliance frameworks.

We’re a construction company, and what drives us to focus on regulations is that we’re a federal contractor. 98% of our international division business is with the U.S. federal government. Previously, we leveraged on-premises data centers and disaster recovery failover within our internal environment. Four to five years ago, we did a lift and shift into AWS. In approaching Lightedge, we were really looking for a provider familiar with AWS best practices and guidelines to keep our environments in line with various compliance requirements.

–Jason Jowers, Director of Infrastructure, BL Harbert International

BL Harbert International’s primary requirements for a new MSP were:

• Specialized expertise in federal and cloud compliance standards
• Deeper AWS management skills and dedicated support resources
• Full cost transparency and actionable strategies to optimize AWS spend
• Proactive security posture management across the AWS account

Why AWS

A Cloud Platform Built for Scale, Security, and Federal-Grade Compliance

AWS was the natural platform of choice for BL Harbert given its unmatched breadth of services, global infrastructure, and proven track record supporting federal contractors. When the company transitioned away from on-premises data centers, AWS offered the scalability and resilience they needed to support both domestic and international operations without the burden of managing physical hardware.

Several AWS capabilities are particularly central to BL Harbert’s environment:

• EC2 & Lambda (Compute): The core of BL Harbert’s workloads run on Amazon EC2 instances, with AWS Lambda supporting event-driven functions. Lightedge guided BL Harbert through the purchase of a Compute Savings Plan covering both EC2 and Lambda, delivering consistent compute capacity at a significantly reduced rate compared to on-demand pricing.
• IAM (Identity and Access Management): Tightening access controls was a priority. AWS IAM’s role-based authentication capabilities allowed Lightedge to reduce BL Harbert’s reliance on static access keys and enforce least-privilege access across the environment.
• AWS Cost Explorer & Billing: Gaining real-time visibility into cloud spend was critical. With Lightedge’s integration of AWS cost management tools and its own customer portal, BL Harbert gained granular insight into resource utilization and spend allocation, replacing the opacity of its previous billing arrangement.
• CloudTrail & Security Services: AWS’s native audit and monitoring capabilities form the backbone of BL Harbert’s compliance posture, enabling continuous logging and activity tracking in line with federal standards.

Beyond individual services, AWS compliance infrastructure, including support for SOC 2, NIST, and FedRAMP-aligned controls, makes it the right foundation for a company where regulatory adherence is non-negotiable. The cloud’s elasticity also means BL Harbert can scale its environment as they pursue new contracts and expands its project footprint globally.

The Solution

Lightedge Delivers Cost Savings, Compliance Automation, and Cloud Clarity

Lightedge, a premier-tier AWS partner and an AWS-validated Managed Secure Services Provider (MSSP), began by restructuring BL Harbert’s billing arrangement to deliver the cost transparency they had been missing. From there, the team moved quickly to identify and implement concrete savings opportunities within AWS.

Compute Savings Plan for EC2 & Lambda

Lightedge guided BL Harbert through the acquisition of an AWS Compute Savings Plan covering both EC2 and Lambda workloads. Unlike traditional Reserved Instances, Compute Savings Plans provide pricing flexibility across instance families, sizes, and regions, as long as a minimum compute commitment is met. This approach delivered approximately $20,000 in monthly cost savings while preserving the operational flexibility a dynamic construction business requires.

Multi-Cloud Compliance Management

Lightedge integrated BL Harbert’s AWS environment with a multi-cloud platform management tool, enabling continuous benchmarking against multiple compliance frameworks simultaneously. Through Lightedge’s customer portal, the BL Harbert team receives real-time dashboard alerts identifying specific remediation actions needed to stay in compliance, eliminating the reactive, manual compliance audits of the past.

Access Key Management & IAM Hardening

One of the highest-impact early wins involved tightening AWS IAM controls. Lightedge worked to identify and remove unnecessary access keys, enforce automated key rotation on 60- or 90-day cycles based on the applicable compliance standard, and shift BL Harbert’s environment toward role-based authentication. The customer portal provides automated notifications when keys approach their rotation window, ensuring compliance is maintained without relying on manual tracking.

Lightedge also ran targeted compliance reports to surface and remediate existing configuration drift, resolving a backlog of issues that had accumulated in the environment before the partnership.

The Results

A Stronger, Leaner, and More Secure AWS Environment

Since partnering with Lightedge, BL Harbert has seen measurable improvements across cost, compliance, and operational confidence:

• $20,000/month in AWS cost savings through strategic use of Compute Savings Plans
• Continuous compliance posture monitoring against multiple federal and cloud frameworks
• Automated IAM key rotation, removing manual compliance risk
• Full AWS spend visibility through integrated dashboards and transparent billing
• Pre-existing environment issues were identified and remediated
• Lightedge effectively fulfilled the roles of multiple third-party vendors, consolidating support under a single trusted partner

“With Lightedge, things are good.”

–Jason Jowers, Director of Infrastructure, BL Harbert International

Building on this foundation, BL Harbert has recently expanded its engagement with Lightedge and is actively exploring opportunities to grow its AWS footprint, with a continued focus on streamlining operational processes, driving additional cost savings, enhancing reporting capabilities, and maintaining its compliance-first posture.

About BL Harbert International

BL Harbert International is a privately owned construction company headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, with operations across the globe. The company delivers construction, design-build, and construction management services across multiple industries, including projects tied to U.S. federal government contracts.