FedRAMP, the federal risk and authorization management program, is a comprehensive and structured way to develop a security – mostly cybersecurity – position when working with the federal government. It’s a framework meant for contractors and third-party businesses that handle information for the government and who need to keep it secure.

The question is, if you’re a cloud service provider, what are the benefits of implementing FedRAMP? Are those benefits any different now in 2024 than they have been in the past? Let’s talk about it.

FedRAMP Allows You to Work with Federal Agencies

First and foremost, you have to ask yourself a question: do you want to provide your cloud services to the federal government and its agencies?

If you answered no to this question, then you don’t have to worry about FedRAMP at all. You can still work on it and even try to achieve certification if you want, but you also have other options, like ISO 27001, general NIST framework compliance, or something like SOC2 or FISMA, which you can use instead.

On the other hand, if you do want to work with the federal government, you will be required to achieve FedRAMP certification. Depending on the kind of service you provide and the kind of information you will be handling, you may be able to go through an expedited process and achieve LI-SaaS status, or you may need the full, rigorous, and detailed audit and set of security controls necessary for a high impact service.

Either way, this is the #1 benefit: FedRAMP enables you to work with the federal government.

A secondary benefit is that you may also be able to work with state-level and local-level government agencies as well. FedRAMP certification does not automatically allow you to work with state-level and lower agencies, but if you then pursue StateRAMP certification, you’ll be 95% of the way there before you even begin.

FedRAMP Provides a Unified Security Standard

One of the biggest benefits of seeking FedRAMP certification is that, by achieving it, you become part of a unified security standard across many businesses and government agencies throughout the country.

Make no mistake: the government, its services, and the businesses that work with it are all constantly under siege. The internet is a roiling mass of threats and attacks coming from all angles, from software set to passively scan IP addresses and seek common vulnerabilities to extremely targeted and even sophisticated specific attacks on individual agencies and businesses.

The goal of FedRAMP is to operate based on a centralized security standard and framework, which is developed by NIST. That’s why the FedRAMP standards are all based on the NIST 800-53 security controls.

The benefit here is that when you choose to run a cloud service provider and work with the government, you essentially paint a target on your back. By meeting and maintaining FedRAMP security standards, you ensure that you are, at the bare minimum, not the weak point in the overall security structure.

Even as a non-governmental contractor, meeting the NIST 800-53 standards puts you ahead of the game compared to many other cloud service providers. Certainly, you could achieve similar levels of security with other frameworks or even self-guided efforts, but the additional benefits of FedRAMP make it more useful to achieve full certification and authority to operate instead.

FedRAMP Carries Brand Recognition Nationally

Another potential benefit of achieving FedRAMP certification is that it has a certain level of brand recognition.

Most people outside of the cybersecurity or government contracting world are unlikely to know what FedRAMP is, but neither are they likely to care. In those cases, having something like “US Government Certified” can be a selling point.

Meanwhile, within cybersecurity and government circles, people know what FedRAMP is, what it means to have achieved an authority to operate, and how rigorous the process is. All of that means that if your business wants to work with other government contractors or even just security-aware businesses – or sophisticated customers who know the ins and outs of government security efforts – they will recognize the FedRAMP name and know what it means.

In a sense, it’s essentially a badge of honor, an award that tells others who know what it means that you’ve undergone a rigorous and relatively exclusive process to achieve a better-than-average level of security for your company. It’s from a certifying body that carries with it a lot of trust and responsibility, so it’s a valuable certification to have.

FedRAMP Offers Security Support and Guidance

One of the biggest benefits of using FedRAMP is that there is a lot of support, knowledge, and even infrastructure built up around it.

When you seek to achieve FedRAMP certification, you have several different entities on your side. For one thing, you have the federal agency you’re working with, your agency partner, who can help work with you and guide you through the process. The FedRAMP program management office itself is also open to questions, and its website is packed with documentation, templates, forms, and instructional materials to help you along the way.

On top of all of this, you also have all of the third-party agencies and businesses working in the same security space. You have to work with a certified third-party assessment organization to perform auditing, penetration testing, and other analyses of your security posture. While sometimes these relationships can be adversarial – a company hired to try to break your system feels aggressive, after all – they all have your best performance in mind.

Most importantly, all of this structure and process means you aren’t forced to try to figure out a security posture on your own. There are hundreds of elements of security that a business needs to consider. Would you rather have to sit down and try to think of all of them or use lists, checklists, and guides to handle it when those resources have been developed over the course of years by teams of experts? Clearly, one of these two options is much better than the other.

There are hundreds of entities, including both government agencies and assistive support industry partners, working with the FedRAMP system. That’s a lot of potential avenues for assistance.

In fact, we here at Ignyte are one such partner. We’re always available if you have questions, and as a certified 3PAO, we’re able to help with the actual process as well.

FedRAMP Security and Risk Management is Top-Notch

As one of the most influential countries in the world, the United States must be a trendsetter in many spheres. As such, FedRAMP is developed by an organization of many of the greatest minds and leaders in cybersecurity, and leverages the most important, most critical knowledge in the entire industry.

Now, there’s an argument to be made that the government is also not exactly an agile or mobile entity. Indeed, FedRAMP changes are relatively rare and are given years of warning before they are fully implemented.

There are two ways the government helps get around this issue.

The first is that FedRAMP itself doesn’t entirely set the standards. Rather, they are based on NIST guidelines, and the NIST is much more agile and able to issue updates and upgrades to their guidelines much more frequently. Instead of going from FedRAMP 3.0 to FedRAMP 4.0, NIST can simply update individual security controls as needed.

The second is that FedRAMP is meant to be more of a framework and set of goals to meet than it is a tangible benchmark to achieve. As the inevitable march of technological progress means increasing changes and challenges, the framework is effectively a moving target, providing standards to resist intrusion rather than specific outlines of patches to apply or password requirements or any other narrower details.

So, while the government as a whole isn’t the most agile of organizations, the structures and data sources that FedRAMP uses are meant to be designed from the ground up for adaptability and growth as security and threats change and evolve over the months and years.

FedRAMP is Increasingly Effective Against Modern Threats

FedRAMP is, essentially, under a constant trial by fire. If a state actor or other significant threat finds a way to intrude on a system, the results can be devastating. Any time any threat is detected with any serious risk of breaking security, the incident is well-documented and analyzed, and recommendations are made to prevent it from happening anywhere else or ever again.

Truthfully, the vast majority of such incidents are not a fault of FedRAMP. Rather, they tend to be the fault of agencies or, more commonly, cloud service providers dropping the ball. Either they achieve FedRAMP but fail to follow up with continuous monitoring, or they simply somehow lied about or misrepresented their security posture and got it past an audit.

Another way this tends to happen was with FedRAMP equivalency. Equivalency was a program where a cloud service provider could claim to be FedRAMP equivalent and manage to work with a government agency while avoiding the more rigorous aspects of auditing and certification. This was frequently abused, which is why the recent DoD memo goes on to specify that the agencies are responsible for the behavior of their contractors and that exploiting equivalency can fall on their heads, on the heads of the CSP. This, ideally, cuts down on another loophole.

When handled appropriately and properly maintained, a FedRAMP-certified security posture is well-positioned against modern cybersecurity threats. Intrusions generally end up caused by unforeseen exploits in code and other essentially unavoidable breaches, rather than issues with overall security, risk, and authentication.

FedRAMP is Faster and More Efficient than Ever

One of the biggest reasons why people tend to avoid going for FedRAMP certification if they can avoid it is the investment it takes to achieve. Getting a FedRAMP authority to operate has historically taken anywhere from 12-18 months if all goes well. If audits are failed and the process needs to be iterated, it can lead to significant delays.

Fortunately, this is an issue the FedRAMP PMO is well aware of and working to alleviate. FedRAMP even recently published a new roadmap for 2024 and beyond, with four primary goals:

• Improving and reorienting the entire process to be focused on the customer experience. This involves simplifying the process for cloud service providers, with the twinned goals of reducing both the time and money it requires to successfully achieve certification.
• Further growth in cybersecurity leadership. This is an overall goal to make expectations clearer and reinforce what we said above; that FedRAMP is meant to be an evergreen and growth-capable framework that adapts to threats, rather than a stolid wall that can be circumvented and can’t respond.
• Growth in the marketplace. The FedRAMP marketplace is an immensely valuable resource for both agencies and cloud providers, and they intend to improve the utility and increase the number of CSPs in the marketplace.
• Smarter operations. Among other initiatives, FedRAMP is working on ways to validate and audit using APIs and other data rather than more manual processes to streamline the whole operation.

Another interesting initiative, though one that is still in the exploratory stages, is developing ways to have reciprocity with other frameworks, so you don’t have to choose between different frameworks and can certify if you’ve already achieved something like ISO 27001.

You can read all of this and more in the new FedRAMP roadmap, here.

FedRAMP is a highly authoritative and trusted framework, and it’s continually growing and evolving to better meet the needs of government agencies, cloud providers, and customers of all sorts. The benefits can be immense for any business that wants both secure operations and high-end customers that seek out that security.

Let Us Help

If you’ve read through this and are now convinced that FedRAMP ATO is a good idea, that’s great! We can help. At Ignyte, there are three ways we can help. Our expertise means we’re always available to answer questions, and the blog you’re reading now is packed full of useful posts and information for your perusal. Second, as a 3PAO, we can help work with you directly through the FedRAMP certification process. Third, our Ignyte Platform was developed from the ground up to be an excellent tool to help get rid of siloed software and improve your record-keeping, so it’s easier to provide reports and audit results to your 3PAO and others involved in the process.

If you’re interested in seeing what we can do for you, feel free to reach out, or just book a demo of our platform today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Ignyte authored by Max Aulakh. Read the original post at: https://www.ignyteplatform.com/blog/fedramp/benefits-of-fedramp-certification/