There was big news in cloud this week with the announcement by GSA on May 14th of the first certified 3rd Party Assessment Organizations (3PAOs). The initial 3PAOs include a federal agency (DOT Enterprise Service Center), SRA International, and a number of small to mid-size companies specializing in FISMA certification. The 3PAOs are an integral part of the FedRAMP process so this action represents a major step forward for the FedRAMP program and vendors wishing to go through the FedRAMP process can now hire one of these approved 3PAOs to assess the security of their system. The link below will take you to GSA’s list of accredited 3PAOs.
Also this week, we began to get some clarity around the role of industry in the shared services initiative, with public comments from OMB Officials about how the strategy will be implemented and what role industry and government shared service providers will play in the initiative. According to OMB, they are not distinguishing public and private sector service providers. Read more from Federal News Radio.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.