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Are you ready for FedRAMP?
Is anyone really?
Actually, yes. With some planning, you can get FedRAMP quickly without blowing out your budget.
There are important things to consider and tools that can help you get FedRAMP ready. Taking these preparations can save you money, time, and stress down the road, so you can reach your compliance goals and increase revenue without extra headache.
FedRAMP prep starts with architecture, tooling, and operational maturity. Answer these 7 questions to decide if your organization is technically prepared to start the journey.
1. Where is Your App Hosted?
Before you spend a dime on consultants, look at your hosting environment.
- Customer Hosted: If your business model involves the customer hosting your software in their environment, stop right now. You likely need to look at FISMA compliance, not FedRAMP.
- Self-Hosted/Small Cloud: If you are hosting in your own datacenter or using a niche provider (like DigitalOcean), you face a steep uphill battle. If you use a provider that isn’t FedRAMP Authorized, you’ll have to audit them yourself, which is a non-starter for most.
Check the FedRAMP marketplace for authorized options. - Major Cloud Providers: If you are hosted on a major provider like AWS, you are in a much stronger starting position to inherit the necessary security controls.
2. Which Architecture Is Best: Servers vs. Containers?
Your architectural choices directly impact your compliance workload and the employees you’ll need to manage it. The more infrastructure you manage, the more you’ll have to patch and manage yourself.
Servers: More Flexibility, High Cost
Managing your own servers offer the highest flexibility, but will require the most effort to manage.
If you go this route, you’ll need to plan on having plenty of personnel available to handle the issues that come up.
Containers: Lower Cost, Less Flexibility
Many orgs use containers because they help lower the barrier for entry to compliance goals. You may have less flexibility, but containers make it possible to simplify your vulnerability management with fewer resources to manage issues.
This is especially true if you use a hardened base image (check out Chainguard or Docker’s open-source options). With a hardened base image, you won’t have to “patch” constantly, instead you kill them and redeploy a hardened image.
This will make your vulnerability management (see below) much easier to defend to your 3PAO.
3. What Vulnerability Management Scanning Tools and Resources Do You Need?
FedRAMP requires rigorous vulnerability scanning.
- Web App: You need scanners checking for web vulnerabilities. Tools like Burp Suite or Tenable can help.
- Containers: You need to check for operational vulnerabilities. The open source app Trivy is a popular option.
- Databases: Don't forget scans specifically looking at your data layer.
- Cloud Native: If you are fully cloud-native, newer tools like Wiz or Orca are popular options. Tools like Tenable Nessus and Qualys are more old-school, but are time-tested,
You’re going to have POA&Ms with FedRAMP, so buying a scanner isn’t enough. Think through how you’ll manage vulnerabilities that come up. You’ll need at least one dedicated human to be responsible for them.
So, before you start FedRAMP, ask, Do you have the internal resources — or a plan to hire a consultant — to manage and fix the vulnerabilities found by these scans? If you don't have a plan for remediation, you aren't ready.
Paramify can automate the busy work of POA&Ms to make them much more manageable. If you’re looking for the right consultant to help with POA&Ms, find an advisor using Paramify to give you the best of both worlds.
“The POA&M process is extraordinarily painful and usually manual. Maintaining consistency in remediating vulnerabilities across many technologies is hard. Paramify is a painkiller. – Ron Karra, Solutions Catalyst, UberEther
→ Request a demo video to see how Paramify can cut your POA&M efforts in half
4. Are You Using FIPS Encrypted Modules?
FedRAMP Moderate prefers and High requires the use of FIPS-validated cryptographic modules for protecting sensitive data. This is the single most common reason engineering teams fail their first 3PAO assessment.
You’ll need to do an analysis of the software you’ve built and what it’s hosted on to make sure you’re using validated modules (like those from AWS or Intel) to protect federal data.
Pro Tip: Your engineering team must configure the environment to use the validated module. For example, in AWS, simply using an AWS service isn't enough; you must ensure your application calls the FIPS endpoints (e.g., s3-fips.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com).
If you opt to use a module that isn't validated, you need to be able to defend that decision to a federal agency.
FIPS 140-2 vs FIPS 140-3
FIPS 140-2 is an older, established standard with more validated modules. 140-3 is a newer, updated standard that’s more aligned with international standards.
You can still use 140-2 validated modules, for now, but opting for 140-3 validated modules will prevent expensive transitions after September 21, 2026 when 140-2 modules are moved to the historical list.
Check the NIST Cryptographic Module Validation Program to see if your encryption is up to par.
Encryption Requirements for FedRAMP 20x
20x requires you to document the modules you’re using, whether they’re validated, and if they’re used to protect federal data. This can give you greater flexibility choosing the best modules for you.
See the full 20x encryption requirements for details.
5. Do You Have Centralized Logging (SIEM)?
You cannot protect what you cannot see. FedRAMP requires a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solution that aggregates logs from every part of your stack:
- Infrastructure
- Database
- Application Runtime
- Access/Audit Logs (Who logged in? Who created this row?)
You need to prove you can trace an event from the infrastructure level all the way to the application layer to understand exactly how data moves and who touched it.
Tools like Splunk, SentinelOne, or Sumo Logic are standard here.
6. Is Your Operational Maturity Ready?
If your engineers are manually logging into the console to make changes (ClickOps), you have a problem.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): You need to describe your infrastructure configuration in code. This allows you to track changes and approvals.
- Disaster Recovery (DR): FedRAMP has strict requirements for recovery times. If your system goes down and you have to manually rebuild it, you will fail. IaC makes rapid redeployment possible.
- Change Management: You need a documented process for code review — both automated and human — before anything hits production. No "willy-nilly" changes allowed.
7. Do You Have the Budget and Bandwidth for FedRAMP Compliance?
Finally, review your resources. FedRAMP is not a side project.
If you’re getting started, consider these factors:
- Personnel: Do you have the dedicated internal resources to do Governance, Risk, and Compliance correctly? Keep in mind, for FedRAMP Moderate and High, the engineers who touch your production "GovCloud" environment must typically be U.S. Persons located on U.S. soil.
If your SRE team is entirely offshore, your budget needs to include a U.S.-based hiring plan. - Budget: Have you budgeted for advisory services, implementation costs, and the third-party audit itself? Not sure how much to plan for — find out how much to budget for FedRAMP.
- Documentation: Reporting can be one of the most time intensive and expensive parts of FedRAMP. Do you have a plan for creating documentation for your ATO Package?
Automation with Paramify can cut effort and costs for documentation by 90% while improving accuracy and making audits easier.
How To Get Started With FedRAMP
If you’re feeling overwhelmed — we’d love to help. Paramify includes a living Gap Assessment that provides you with an accelerated roadmap to reach your compliance goals. Your accurate documentation will automatically generate as you implement solutions.
The guided, automated process with Paramify will allow you to meet goals faster while spending much less.
In fact, top-tier advisors use Paramify for their customers and 3PAOs love auditing our documentation.
→ See how simple accelerated compliance can be: Request a video demo of Paramify.
More Resources to Prepare for FedRAMP
- How to Get FedRAMP and How Long it Will Take
- 3 Ways to Automate Your FedRAMP Process
- What’s Your FedRAMP Impact Level?
Are You Ready For FedRAMP?
FedRAMP is achievable, but it favors the prepared.
By modernizing your architecture (containers over servers), automating your operations (IaC over ClickOps), and ensuring you have the budget for the human element of security (vulnerability management), you can drastically shorten your timeline to authorization.
Schedule a demo with Paramify below for help getting started. Many CSPs use our tool to simplify their process, automate documentation, and lower costs.
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