FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is led by GSA and is a soon-to-be mandatory government wide program that standardizes the government’s approach to authorizing cloud services for use by federal agencies and monitoring those services to ensure that they continue to meet federal cybersecurity requirements.Once a service goes through the initial FedRAMP authorization process, it will get a stamp of approval that all agencies can use to sign off on the service’s ability to meet federal security requirements. FedRAMP is still in pre-launch stage. The launch of its initial operational capabilities is scheduled for June 2012, and the focus will be on infrastructure as a service and e-mail as service. Full operational capabilities are scheduled for the second quarter of fiscal 2013. At this stage, FedRamp will include more diverse products and services. By 2014 the government will move to full implementation with on-demand scalability and all federal agencies will be required to use the FedRAMP process for assessments.

Identity management solutions safely guard and control user identities and privileges. Single Sign-On (SSO) enables organizations to provide authorized user access to systems and services providing efficient management of the entire identity lifecycle. This includes assessing, planning, implementing, auditing, and maintaining identities and access privileges. Government agencies are taking an aggressive stance of migrating to the cloud which promises to reduce the cost of delivering government services in this fiscally conservative environment. Cloud Identity management plays a central role in securing cloud deployments.