The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, is a federal government-wide program that offers a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. The program is designed to build confidence among government users to encourage increased and widespread cloud use. FedRAMP aims to demonstrate that adopting the cloud not only makes sense financially and operationally, but can be done securely. For the first several years of introduction (and encouragement) of cloud into the federal government, the biggest roadblock was the perception that giving up itemized control of systems meant weakened security and greater vulnerability. FedRAMP offers a way for agencies and their leaders to feel assured that cloud solutions can stand up to the same, if not higher, standards than in-house deployments.
Today, FedRAMP is still a work in process. Vendors and their products are continuously going through the compliance process, meeting with Joint Authorization Boards (JAB) or an Authorization Agency to reach the strict levels of cybersecurity that FedRAMP demands. The FedRAMP assessment process starts with agencies or Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) aligning FedRAMP requirements with their service offerings or needs. CSPs must implement the FedRAMP security requirements on their environment and hire a FedRAMP-approved third party assessment organization (3PAO) to perform an independent review. The 3PAO report audits the cloud system and provides a security assessment package for JAB analysis. The FedRAMP JAB or Authorization Agency then reviews the security analysis package based on a prioritized approach and then may grant a provisional authorization to the product or service offering. Federal agencies can leverage CSP authorization packages for review when granting an agency Authority to Operate (ATO), saving all parties time and money.
At Carahsoft, our team is proud to offer a wide range of FedRAMP compliant systems. With the help of our vendor partners, government agencies can confidently move nearly every facet of their business operations into the cloud, allowing for cost savings, modernized architectures, and flexibility.
We are pleased to offer the following FedRAMP compliant systems to public sector customers:
- Digital Government and Content Management – helps to provide the most up-to-date information to citizens via the web. FedRAMP is crucial in this area as digital government involves the exchange of sensitive and personal information. Agencies must be sure citizen and employee data is transmitted and stored securely.
- Collaboration – assists government agencies in uniting disparate teams, helping them to work together and communicate over a single platform, accessible from anywhere and on any device. The free exchange of ideas and documents must be supported by a secure infrastructure that protects all data.
- IT Management – by deploying infrastructure in the cloud, agencies can eliminate annual capital expenditures as well as automate the management of key systems to ensure patches and updates are applied correctly and on-time. The heart of cloud benefits lies in the ability to move infrastructure spending from operational expenditures to capital expenditures and do so in a way that reduces the burden on in-house IT teams. These benefits may seem straightforward, but the security concerns of moving IT off-premise are real roadblocks. FedRAMP was designed to mitigate this barrier.
- Security – from applications to infrastructure, cloud solutions ensure that the most recent vulnerability insight data is being applied to networks to prevent attacks. FedRAMP not only ensures that the full range of cloud solutions is secure, but also validates new security offerings that are delivered via cloud for better accessibility and scalability.
For more information about the FedRAMP program or our FedRAMP-complaint and soon-to-be compliant partners, click here.
