U.S. General Services Administration
FedRAMP JAB Prioritization: Help Us Shape Who Works with the JAB
Post filed in: FedRAMP | Technology | Technology Transformation Services
When building any program, a key focus in initial growth is to ensure that you have a broad selection of services or products customers can use. This is exactly how the Program Management Office (PMO) and the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) teams have operated since launching FedRAMP. As FedRAMP grew, the PMO and JAB prioritized vendors for provisional authorizations based on a “first come first served” basis. This was to build the list of FedRAMP vendors in the FedRAMP marketplace as quickly as possible.
As any program matures, the focus and priorities of the program must evolve as well. We are working through proving FedRAMP Accelerated, a key element of how we scale this is to prioritize the vendors we work with. In order to have a more strategic focus on the work we do, the JAB is in the process of finalizing the criteria by which we will select the vendors to provisionally authorize.
The JAB invests heavily into creating a broad marketplace of providers and needs to ensure that the energy put into authorizing providers has a clear return on investment for the US government. Through some help from our industry partners, FedRAMP received some great proposals and ideas for how to prioritize vendors. One of the overarching themes was the JAB should work with vendors who are capable of achieving a FedRAMP authorization and can demonstrate demand for their service by the federal government. As the JAB teams have taken these proposals and ideas, we’ve generated what we believe to be simple and straightforward criteria to prioritizing vendors:
- Criteria 1: FedRAMP Ready?This is a go/no-go. Has a vendor completed a FedRAMP Readiness Assessment and the PMO has approved them as FedRAMP Ready?
- Criteria 2: Demand? This is a go/no-go and is scaled. Does a vendor have current or future demand by at least 6 agencies? This can be proven in a few ways – current customer list, vendor supplied business case for meeting demand in a short time period (12-24 months), Administration priority, and agency requests.
- Criteria 3: Preferences. This criteria is not a go/no-go, but will add additional weight to services that are equal in terms of demand.
This criteria is not final however. We’re looking for feedback before we finalize the prioritization criteria in the next 30-60 days. We want you to let us know what you think about the criteria and any suggestions you have on improving the criteria as it exists now.
We’ve created a 7 question survey that shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to complete. The survey will be open until COB Friday September 2, 2016. Let us know and help shape who works with the JAB!