Blog
August 28, 2024
Modernizing your IT infrastructure for FedRAMP certification is a complex journey — legacy systems, tight budgets, and the looming shadow of compliance can feel overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be that way: we're here to simplify the process and help you navigate the mandatory steps toward certification.
Table of Contents:
- What is FedRAMP Certification?
- Low, Moderate, or High: The Categories of FedRAMP Compliance
- Steps to Meet FedRAMP Compliance
- How Automation Accelerates FedRAMP Certification
What is FedRAMP Certification?
FedRAMP (The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is the gold standard for cloud security in the US government. This rigorous program makes sure that cloud products and services meet the highest security standards to protect sensitive federal data.
Started in 2011, the FedRAMP authorization process ensures that cloud-based offerings meet requirements that are compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 rev4. In short: it ensures that cloud service providers (CSPs) meet the strict security requirements necessary to protect sensitive federal data.
FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services — critical to ensure that everyone is staying aligned with industry best-practices for cybersecurity.
Codified in 2022, the increase of cloud products has intensified the need for standardized security measures. Per the FedRAMP website: “In FY22, FedRAMP authorized cloud products were reused more than 4,500 times across the federal government, a 60% increase in reuse from FY21 and a 132% increase from FY20. The FedRAMP community continues to grow and includes 204 participating agencies, 280+ cloud service providers, and 40 recognized third-party assessment organizations.”
FedRAMP controls likely cover many of the tasks you’re already managing for security, such as:
- Access Control
- Risk Assessment
- Configuration Management
- Maintenance
- Incident Response
Getting a FedRAMP certification proves that CSPs are committed to security and building trust with potential customers. Most importantly, the certification process can improve an organization's overall security posture.
Who Needs to Comply with FedRAMP?
FedRAMP is mandatory for any cloud service provider (CSP) offering services to a federal agency. Federal and State agencies, along with CSPs, who handle non-classified federal data and transmit it through a cloud environment need to be compliant.
On-site/private-clouds, or infrastructure only services that do not handle data do not need to be compliant — they can use just NIST 800-53 and the FISMA process without the extra overhead.
To safeguard sensitive federal data stored in the cloud, agencies must adhere to FedRAMP standards. When an agency and a CSP collaborate, they work together to achieve the necessary FedRAMP authorization. FedRAMP's overall goal is to build strong partnerships with CSPs and promote secure cloud adoption across the federal government.
What is the Difference Between FedRAMP and StateRAMP?
Both FedRAMP and StateRAMP certification programs are built on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53 Rev. 4 requirements, but only StateRAMP provides states and local governments with visibility and continuous monitoring reporting around their vendors.
StateRAMP is a non-profit organization focused on improving state and local government cybersecurity through education, advocacy, and providing resources to service providers. It offers a flexible path to security certification, including continuous monitoring and visibility for government entities.
Key differences include:
- Governance: StateRAMP is a non-profit, FedRAMP is government-run.
- Overall Goal: StateRAMP promotes cybersecurity best practices, FedRAMP focuses on cloud service adoption.
- Process: StateRAMP offers more flexibility and transparency, FedRAMP has stricter requirements and timelines.
- Status: StateRAMP statuses are more persistent, FedRAMP statuses have expiration dates.
StateRAMP simplifies security compliance for providers and enhances trust for state and local governments, who can gain access to a centralized repository of security information and make better risk management decisions.
Low, Moderate, or High: The Categories of FedRAMP
Compliance FedRAMP seeks to understand how damaging a successful cyberattack would be based on the agency and the kind of information stored. The three categories, or impact levels, of FedRAMP compliance, are a way to better understand the type of data that a CSO (cloud service offering) stores, which determines how many controls will need to be in place. Here is a brief explainer of each risk level:
Low Impact
If there was a CSO security breach at the “low impact” level, it simply means that the breach would have limited adverse effects on operations, individuals, or assets. As an example: if a National Park kept records of email addresses for everyone who visited a certain campsite, and those records were released — it’s unlikely that there would be devastating financial and personal impact.
Moderate Impact
Most CSP applications are categorized under “Moderate Impact.” This would mean that in a breach, there could be serious financial loss and harm. This makes sense — most CSP applications deal with budgets and business contracts that don’t put national security at risk. But a cyberattack would still be a huge problem with far-reaching consequences for the agencies involved.
High Impact
Any industry where a breach would be “severe or catastrophic” is considered high impact. Industries like healthcare, financial services, or emergency response all fall within this High Impact classification and need to adhere to the strictest security controls.
Different parts of the organization might also have different impact levels. As an example, you can think of a company that responds to emergency events. If they were hacked and a list of past emergency response dates were leaked — this would be “low impact.” Hacking data around the investigative information around the event would have a higher impact.
Each impact level shares the three common objectives: confidentiality, integrity, and availability — however higher levels include additional controls, like continuous monitoring and encryption. Personal data, proprietary information, and other types of data stored must be sufficiently guarded and available when appropriate. CSPs need to prove that they are enforcing restrictions on sensitive information and verifying the authenticity of a person trying to access this information.
As an example, let’s say you had a treasure chest filled with pirate gold. To protect it, you ripped up any treasure maps that existed leading to the chest, re-buried the chest in a new location that only you know about, and then you covered the entire chest with locks. That covers confidentiality and integrity — but what if you need to access the gold yourself? That’s why availability is a huge component of these security objectives. Authorized users need to have easy access to the information they need to get the job done.
Steps to Meet FedRAMP Compliance
To achieve FedRAMP compliance, you’ll need to follow a framework of assessment, authorization, and ongoing monitoring. Here are the (simplified!) key steps to FedRAMP compliance:
- Document Preparation: Gather necessary documents and templates from the FedRAMP website — from there you’ll need to undergo a FIPS 199 assessment to determine your impact level and required controls.
- FIPS 199 Assessment: Categorize your data as low, moderate, or high impact (as mentioned in the previous section of this blog) to identify appropriate security controls. Most CSPs fall into the moderate category.
- Readiness Assessment with Third-Party Support: Consider a voluntary Third-Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) readiness assessment to identify gaps and prepare for the authorization process.
- Security Assessment Report (SAR): The 3PAO will issue the necessary SAR outlining any findings and recommendations.
- Build a Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M): Your plan should also include key milestones to address identified security gaps that were identified in the SAR.
- Remediation: Now it’s time to get to work — this is the step where you will put your plan of action to work to correct anything in your systems that are out of compliance.
- Authorization: Previously, you had to choose between the Agency or Joint Authorization Board (JAB) process for authorization, but as of August 12, 2024, all authorized CSPs are considered “FedRAMP authorized.” See more details about this change below.
- Continuous Monitoring: From here, you’ll need to maintain ongoing security measures and documentation.
What are the differences between Agency and JAB processes for authorization?
As of August 2024, there are no more tiers of authorization (JAB and Agency). All authorized cloud service providers (CSPs) are simply considered "FedRAMP Authorized."
For CSPs previously authorized by the Joint Authorization Board (JAB), their continuous monitoring will be transferred to either a government agency or FedRAMP itself.
How Automation Accelerates FedRAMP Certification
With FedRAMP, it can take a year or longer — and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — to certify a cloud-based capability as meeting federal cybersecurity standards.
Why not automate compliance benchmarks and achieve + maintain faster certification? Learn how this U.S. agency reached 98% compliance with Puppet automation:
The idea is simple: by reusing exact copies of packages and templates that have already been deployed, configured, and FedRAMP-accredited to stand up new instances of a cloud-based capability, you can dramatically speed up the certification process.
Puppet uses a declarative approach to infrastructure management that can automate many FedRAMP-related tasks, like:
- Configuration Management as Code — Standardization, version control, and remediation
- Infrastructure Provisioning — Reproduce existing environments, integrate security controls
- Compliance Reporting — Data collection, report generation
- Continuous Monitoring — Configuration drift detection, security policy enforcement
Automating time-consuming tasks is a great way to increase efficiency, save valuable team resources, and reduce effort. These common tasks include security patch management, managing access controls, auditing system configurations, and more.
Puppet solutions are available across all cloud providers so that federal agencies that manage systems in GovCloud can use Puppet to manage, maintain, and enforce their security configurations to comply not only with FedRAMP, but also the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), the United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB), the NIST SP 800-series publications and Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), or any other policies, as needed.
Want to start automating FedRAMP benchmark requirements with powerful policy-as-code? Try Puppet: