There are several compliance standards for federal and defense cybersecurity. CMMC, FedRAMP, the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and the Risk Management Framework (RMF) all serve critical functions in protecting government IT systems and associated vendor products and services.

Behind all of these frameworks are crucial security publications, each one serving a particular purpose in defining the practices, controls and procedures that organizations can use to meet their compliance demands. We’ve previously covered such documents as NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171, showing how these documents play a role in national cyber defense.

In this article, we’ll discuss two more guidelines: Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 199 and FIPS 200.

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It makes sense that some of the more powerful and rigorous security regulations are in the federal government. As federal agencies turn to third-party IT vendors to fulfill their missions, the demand for transparent, translatable and effective security regulations is only increasing. That’s why NIST 800-53, now on its fifth revision, is so important for agencies and contractors alike. 

Here, learn more about NIST 800-53, why it is so important to government (and, increasingly, private sector) IT security and why it benefits you to consider adopting its standards. 

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Federal agencies are quickly adopting new and more advanced IT and security technologies to facilitate their work. This fact, in turn, means that they are turning to vendors that probably use the cloud in some way to provide those services. SaaS applications, cloud storage, and the demand for analytics and insight are making cloud real estate a hot commodity for these agencies. That’s why the federal government, coordinating through federal technical guidelines and laws, requires Cloud Service Providers to adhere to the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP before providing services to partner agencies.

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