Salesforce Awarded FedRamp Certification
Salesforce has been making splashes in cloud news headlines over the past couple weeks. Salesforce’s latest headline involves the cloud computing pioneer just beating out the FedRamp certification deadline. For any company wanting to conduct cloud computing business with the US federal government, the FedRamp certification must be obtained by June 5th 2014.
FedRamp is the program that the US federal government uses to pre-screen cloud vendors. There are specific criteria that each FedRamp certified company must meet in order to begin working with the feds. Getting the FedRamp certification gives Salesforce an edge in negotiating federal cloud contracts and it can be used as a way to bring in outside clientele based on the fact that the government sees any FedRamp certified company as a trusted vendor.
There is something a little different about this version of the FedRamp certification. Salesforce received the certification in both SaaS and PaaS. Other vendors such as IBM and AWS have received the IaaS flavor of the FedRamp certification. Since Salesforce will be operating with the SaaS and PaaS certification, it goes to show that the US federal government could become more at ease with using third party platforms versus building out their own on top of IaaS.
Salesforce has been viewed as one of the easiest ways to create, deploy and monetize business apps. Since Salesforce has received this accreditation, Salesforce’s app development community now has access to those in the federal government who may prefer using specific Salesforce apps. Prior to the Salesforce FedRamp certification, independent vendors on Salesforce needed to seek out their own FedRamp certifications in order to deploy apps to those inside of the government. Since Salesforce has received this certification before the deadline, application developers who operate inside of Salesforce are now able to reach those federal clients that they weren’t able to target before.
This becomes a win-win for independent vendors, Salesforce and the US government on many different levels. Another significant positive from this certification is that many cloud architects that the US government has hired are proficient in Salesforce. Now that Saleforce has been fully FedRamp’ed, cloud engineers hired by the U.S. government will have more accessibility to the tools and platform that they prefer when working the government’s cloud.
