The General Services Administration’s (GSA) FedRAMP 20x initiative has announced its first four authorizations since the 20x revamp effort was unveiled on March 24.
The 20x effort, which has proceeded since March through several working group structures, is placing a heavy focus on automation to speed the approval process for secure cloud services authorized by the program.
“On the one year anniversary of M-24-15, four cloud service offerings received the first FedRAMP 20x authorizations,” said FedRAMP Director Pete Waterman in a social media post on July 26.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) M-24-015 memo issued lest year provided guidance to overhaul FedRAMP, reduce pain points in previous program processes, and bolster the program’s role as a cornerstone of Federal cloud security.
“It’s a humble start to meet the vision outlined a year ago by OMB,” Waterman said in his post.
“FedRAMP has provided significant value to date, but the program must change to meet the needs of Federal agencies and the evolving cloud marketplace,” he continued.
“The FedRAMP Marketplace must scale dramatically to enable Federal agencies to work with many thousands of different cloud-based services that accelerate key agency operations while allowing agencies to reduce the footprint of the information technology (IT) infrastructure that they directly manage,” Waterman said.
Brian Conrad, a former FedRAMP director who is now the director of strategic global compliance initiatives at Zscaler, told MeriTalk today that Zscaler “is very supportive of the program, and we’re excited to see where it goes.”
“We know that this is just the beginning of some really great things,” he said.