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What is FedRAMP?

FedRAMP is a government-wide program that standardizes how the security of cloud services is assessed and authorized — so each service can be reviewed once and reused by many agencies.

The short version

FedRAMP stands for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. It gives U.S. federal agencies a single, standardized way to evaluate whether a cloud product or service is secure enough to hold government data.

Before FedRAMP, every agency assessed cloud services on its own. A vendor selling the same product to ten agencies could face ten separate, inconsistent security reviews. FedRAMP replaces that with one rigorous assessment that any agency can reuse.

"Do once, use many times"

This is the idea at the heart of FedRAMP:

  • A cloud service provider goes through one standardized security assessment.
  • The resulting security package is stored in a central repository.
  • Any federal agency can review that package and grant its own authorization to use the service, without repeating the whole assessment.

The result is less duplicated effort, more consistent security, and faster cloud adoption across government.

Why it exists

FedRAMP was established in 2011 by a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as part of the federal government's "Cloud First" push to modernize IT. Its goals:

  • Standardize cloud security assessments across agencies.
  • Accelerate the adoption of secure cloud services.
  • Improve confidence in the security of cloud solutions.
  • Increase reuse of existing security assessments.

In December 2022, the FedRAMP Authorization Act (passed as part of the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act) wrote the program into law, giving it a permanent statutory footing and formalizing its governance.

What FedRAMP builds on

FedRAMP does not invent security controls from scratch. It builds directly on standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST):

The standards underneath FedRAMP

  • FIPS 199 — categorizes systems by impact level (Low, Moderate, High).
  • NIST SP 800-53 — the catalog of security and privacy controls that make up each baseline.
  • NIST SP 800-37 — the Risk Management Framework (RMF) that structures the authorization lifecycle.

What it applies to

FedRAMP applies to cloud services used by federal agencies — Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). If an executive-branch agency wants to put federal data in a cloud service, that service generally needs a FedRAMP authorization.

It does not directly govern on-premises systems an agency runs entirely itself, though those follow the same underlying NIST Risk Management Framework.

Where to go next

  • Authorization paths — how a service actually earns its authorization.
  • Impact levels — Low, Moderate, and High, and what determines them.
  • The process — the end-to-end journey from readiness to continuous monitoring.