Crystal Tower

Software Factory ready to go, built on top of Big Bang and Iron Bank.

The Crystal Tower foundation is meticulously designed for security-minded enterprises, aiming to streamline their software development and deployment processes while adhering to the highest standards of security and compliance. At its core, Crystal Tower leverages the highly available GitLab with Premium licensing for all users, ensuring robust version control and seamless collaboration across teams. This setup fosters an environment where developers can work more efficiently, with all changes being tracked, reviewed, and merged in a secure and orderly manner.

A key feature of Crystal Tower is its elastic infrastructure, which offers high-performance build, test, and automation capabilities that optimize your CI/CD pipelines. This elasticity ensures that your resources are dynamically allocated, scaling up or down based on demand, which is essential for handling large-scale projects and complex builds without compromising performance.

Integrated Single Sign-On (SSO) ensures secure user authentication across the platform, streamlining access management while maintaining security. The zero-trust, Mutual TLS-enabled service mesh enhances service communication encryption, ensuring that data in transit between services remains secure, which is crucial for environments that handle sensitive or classified information. Crystal Tower is fully compliant with Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), making it suitable for use in highly regulated industries such as defense and aerospace.

Furthermore, Crystal Tower is continuously monitored and updated to the latest secured versions of all components, providing peace of mind and ensuring that the platform remains resilient against emerging threats. This continuous monitoring and updating process is automated, reducing the operational burden on your teams and allowing them to focus on innovation rather than maintenance.

In addition to these robust features, Crystal Tower now offers support for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) tailored specifically for MATLAB with Simulink. This integration allows engineers and scientists to access MATLAB and Simulink in a virtualized environment, providing them with the flexibility to perform complex simulations and analyses from any location, without the need for high-performance local hardware. The VDI support is optimized to leverage the power of Crystal Tower’s elastic infrastructure, ensuring that computational resources are allocated efficiently, and performance is not compromised.

This VDI solution is particularly beneficial for organizations that require high levels of security and control over their development environments. By hosting MATLAB and Simulink on Crystal Tower’s secure and compliant infrastructure, organizations can ensure that their intellectual property and sensitive data are protected while still providing their teams with the tools they need to innovate and deliver high-quality products.

Crystal Tower’s Software Factory is built on the foundations of Big Bang and Iron Bank, platforms that are known for their robustness, security, and scalability. Big Bang, with its cloud-native architecture, allows for the rapid deployment and scaling of applications across multiple environments, including air-gapped networks. This capability is crucial for organizations that operate in both classified and unclassified environments, as it ensures that applications can be deployed and maintained with minimal disruption and maximum security.

Iron Bank, on the other hand, provides a secure container registry that ensures all containerized applications meet stringent security standards before they are deployed. This container hardening process is essential for maintaining a secure and resilient infrastructure, as it prevents vulnerabilities from being introduced into the environment. The integration of Iron Bank into Crystal Tower’s Software Factory ensures that all applications deployed on the platform are secure by design, reducing the risk of security breaches and ensuring compliance with DoD standards.

By combining the power of Big Bang and Iron Bank with the advanced features of Crystal Tower, organizations can build and maintain a secure, compliant, and efficient DevOps environment that meets the needs of modern enterprises. Whether you are developing software for defense, aerospace, or any other highly regulated industry, Crystal Tower provides the tools and infrastructure needed to innovate securely and efficiently.

In summary, Crystal Tower is not just a DevOps platform; it is a comprehensive solution for enterprises that demand the highest levels of security, compliance, and performance in their software development processes. With support for VDI, MATLAB with Simulink, and a foundation built on Big Bang and Iron Bank, Crystal Tower is ready to meet the most challenging requirements of today’s digital landscape.