When it comes to the development and deployment of cloud products and services, FedRAMP compliance scrutinizes the software development lifecycle. Today, developers are stuck with highly manual, error-prone, and resource intensive processes that don’t meet the FedRAMP requirements.
What is FedRAMP Compliance?
FedRAMP compliance is an important requirement for any software that wants to be used by the US government. It’s a security procedure in which data is collected and analyzed against federal requirements, helping to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access or malicious attacks. The process involves multiple levels of review, ensuring that all technical requirements are met while at the same time protecting customer data and privacy.
By going through FedRAMP compliance, software providers demonstrate their commitment to meeting the high standards set by the US government. Companies that successfully pass the review process can be certified for use on government networks and systems. This provides assurance to taxpayers and agencies alike that their data is secure and protected.
What are Some Common FedRAMP Compliance Challenges?
The following factors are common blockers of FedRAMP compliance:
- NO HOLISTIC VIEW: Lack of visibility into the entire delivery process makes it harder to centralize governance, establish the necessary internal controls, and understand where inefficiencies occur within deployment pipelines.
- LOW DEPLOYMENT VELOCITY: Manual deployment processes can be error-prone and resource intensive. Add in the need to deploy to air-gapped environments like GovCloud and your ability to deploy software grinds to a crawl.
- POOR RELIABILITY & SECURITY: Lack of visibility, automation, and rollback capabilities increases the risk associated with deploying into production and impacts the confidence of the developers.
- LACK OF ACCESS: When deploying to a FedRAMP environment, you often can’t give all developers access to it. By making deployments automated and consistent across environments, you enable FedRAMP environments to be deployed through the same automation developers maintain for non-FedRAMP environments.
How Continuous Deployment Accelerates FedRAMP Compliance
In order to overcome these challenges, organizations need to automate the software delivery process and streamline what was previously highly manual, resource intensive, and error-prone. However, currently popular manual and complicated delivery tooling can fall short in addressing the various controls to both achieve and maintain FedRAMP compliance over time.
The right continuous deployment tool can get your software changes to production quickly, safely, and automatically, supporting FedRAMP compliance by completely streamlining the software delivery process.
- Automate deployment across environments, regions, and cloud providers into continuous deployment pipelines
- Design and automate a delivery process that fits your release cadence and the business criticality of your application
- Ensure safety across cluster deployments and pipeline executions
- Integrate automated testing techniques, such as smoke tests or automated canary analysis into the delivery process
- Leverage the same deployment pipeline when deploying to your Infosec environment vs. other production environments
- Leverage pipeline logic that supports required FedRAMP controls
