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.

FedRAMP is the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, and it’s one of the common security frameworks used by the government, its agencies, and the contractors that work with it. However, it’s not solely restricted to the government: FedRAMP can be used in the private sector just as well. The question is, how does it work if you want to do so, do you need to follow it, and what are the benefits of doing so?

Whenever a business wants to work with the federal government, they are going to have to comply with certain frameworks to guarantee that, as part of the federal supply chain, it is secured to an appropriate level. The specific frameworks and standards vary based on factors such as impact levels and whether or not you’re in an industry with specific guidelines, like HIPAA or DoD standards.

Any business or service provider looking to work with the federal government or one of its departments or agencies is going to need to comply with one of the security frameworks as appropriate for their role, usually something like CMMC, FedRAMP, or HITRUST. A key part of these security frameworks is verification and validation that security measures are in place and that continuous monitoring is effective.

ConMon: FedRAMP Continuous Monitoring and How It Works Obtaining a software approval with the federal government and its agencies as a contractor and obtaining an Authority to Operate (ATO) is not a one-time process. We’re not just referring to the need to recertify annually and pass occasional audits. We’re talking about an additional part of the process, the final part of the NIST Risk Management Framework: Monitoring.

What is OSCAL and Why Does It Matter for NIST and FedRAMP? Complying with federal cybersecurity guidelines is a difficult task. Unfortunately, many contractors and cloud service providers take a rather lax view of compliance, and it’s an all-too-common scenario for a company to build up standards and practices for audit time and let them slip immediately thereafter until the lead-up to the next audit. Part of this is simply the immense complexity of cybersecurity.

One of the biggest challenges for a business with any sort of information security needs is ensuring proper handling of that information. With hundreds of data breaches, large and small, happening every single year, you don’t want to be a statistic. More than that, though, if you’re working on a government contract and using a framework like HITRUST, HIPAA, or FedRAMP, you need to adhere to high standards.

As time marches on and technology develops, there’s a constant push and pull between information security and attempts to breach that security. Obscurity – simply hiding from sight – isn’t enough with automated processes capable of scanning any possible address looking for signs of life, so much of modern computer security comes down to cryptography. Pretty much everyone has some experience with cryptography, from our childhood spy media to modern computer science.