The General Services Administration announced today that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Government was issued a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) by the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) on Sept. 22, the first product to receive one through the new FedRAMP Accelerated program.
“The new FedRAMP process—FedRAMP Accelerated—was designed to be more in line with the speed of digital transformation, creating a more predictable and reliable timeline for CSPs to become authorized within FedRAMP,” wrote Susie Adams, CTO of Microsoft Federal, in the Microsoft press release. “Microsoft has been working with FedRAMP since its inception, which allowed it to meet the new FedRAMP standards and achieve the P-ATO within just 15 weeks since beginning the FedRAMP Accelerated review process.”
The 15-week authorization process is nearly seven times faster than FedRAMP’s most previous ATO, and well within the six-month goal set by GSA when the FedRAMP Accelerated program was announced.
Part of this change in speed comes from the FedRAMP Readiness Assessment Report (RAR) which can be used to determine if a cloud service provider (CSP) is “FedRAMP Ready.”
“These readiness assessments ensure that CSPs entering the FedRAMP authorization process have the key technical capabilities in place prior to beginning an authorization,” Matt Goodrich, the FedRAMP director, wrote in a blog announcing Microsoft’s P-ATO. “This ensures vendors won’t have to introduce new technologies or engineering updates to their system during authorization.”
Unisys’ Secure Private Cloud for Government and Edge for Government and 18F’s Cloud.gov were also part of the original FedRAMP Accelerated program and are expected to receive authorization within the six-month time frame.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the Microsoft product that received the P-ATO.
