The stereotype of the government as a slow-moving behemoth is not ill-fitting, but when it makes adjustments and changes, it does so with deliberation and intent. An excellent example is the ongoing development and evolution of things like security standards. Technology moves much, much faster than the government can respond to or that even most businesses could adjust to without a significant investment or a time delay.

The world advances based on innovation, and innovation can come from anywhere. The trouble is that the current capitalist economic system encourages large corporations to play conservatively with their products and their budgets while working to secure their own positions in their industries. It becomes quite difficult for a new small business to enter the field, especially if they’re trying to enter a field that requires substantial facilities, research, or resources to get established.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program has been around for nearly 15 years. In that time, it changed and was updated periodically to keep up with the times. While changes are occasionally made to the underlying security frameworks like FedRAMP, CMMC and the NIST documentation that reviews each security control, there is also communication directly from the Department of Defense and other organizations to issue additional guidance.

Here at Ignyte, we talk a lot about the most common and popular security certifications and frameworks for cloud service providers and others, FedRAMP, CMMC, and their associated NIST publications. These are very important, but they’re far from everything that can be relevant to a CSP or to businesses looking to maintain their security credentials. Most CSPs have to deal with basic PII, CUI, and other forms of protected information that may be treated broadly the same.