CTC Partners With Autonomic Resources To Obtain First SaaS FedRAMP Certification

Autonomic Resources has become the first cloud vendor with FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB) Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) to facilitate achievement of FedRAMP P-ATO status for another vendor’s application, namely, Concurrent Technologies Corporation’s (CTC) Unclassified Remote Hosted Desktop (URHD) SaaS application. By building its UHRD on top of Autonomic’s ARC-P IaaS platform, CTC was able to leverage Autonomic’s pre-existing FedRAMP P-ATO status to streamline its application process. Matthew Goodrich, program manager for FedRAMP at the General Services Administration, surmised the significance of CTC’s recently minted P-ATO status as follows:

CTC’s SaaS virtual desktop environment proves that the FedRAMP authorization process works for all types of clouds, from infrastructure to software. Additionally, CTC’s use of Autonomic Resources ARC-P Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for a portion of their offering demonstrates the ability of CSPs to partner and enhance service offerings to the federal government, while also saving time and money by leveraging a previously authorized provider’s environment.

Goodrich points out that the achievement of P-ATO status on by “CTC’s SaaS virtual desktop environment” represents two firsts: a first for a SaaS application to obtain FedRAMP P-ATO status, and a first in the way of a partnership between a vendor seeking FedRAMP certification, and a vendor that had already achieved certification. In a press release, Autonomic Resources noted that it is similarly collaborating with several other SaaS vendors to help them obtain FedRAMP certification. The precedent established by the collaboration between Autonomic Resources and CTC suggests that, in the case of SaaS applications seeking FedRAMP certification, partnerships with existing IaaS vendors that have already obtained P-ATO status may well be the simplest, most expeditious path toward obtaining the authority to do business with the Federal government and its constituent agencies. To date, FedRAMP P-ATO certification has been achieved by an elite group of vendors currently spanned by Akamai, AT&T, Autonomic Resources, CGI Federal, Concurrent Technologies Corporation, HP, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, IBM whereas Amazon Web Services has achieved full FedRAMP ATO status.