FedRAMP Helps Secure Federal and Other Networks as They Transition to Cloud

By: Dolan Sullivan, Vice President of Federal at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

Recently, it seems like you can’t go more than a few days without hearing about another significant cyberattack. From oil pipelines and meat producers to hospitals and city water supplies, no segment of our nation’s critical infrastructure is immune to hackers. As bad actors become more daring in their targets and more creative with their exploits, securing people, places, and things—wherever they are—has never been more urgent for Federal IT leaders.

Against this backdrop of unprecedented cyberattacks on our nation, other factors are contributing to the increased need for more robust security measures and policies to protect our Federal networks. For example, telework continues out of necessity, and in some cases, staff preference. Adoption of smart controls for equipment, physical access to facilities, environmental management, and other uses of IoT, is growing. Improving cybersecurity to protect the Federal government networks is an Executive Order. And, the uptake of cloud apps and services has accelerated.

Enabling the Secure Shift to Cloud-Managed Networking 

As agencies rapidly shift to cloud to reduce network maintenance and management workloads and improve cost-effectiveness, one area of limited progress has been network infrastructure. The ability to safely and confidently modernize agency networks by moving to cloud-managed networking can dramatically improve the user experience while streamlining IT operations, freeing up IT personnel to focus on meeting mission objectives and innovation.

To help ensure a safe and secure transition to cloud, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a U.S. government program whose mission is to promote the adoption of secure cloud services across the Federal Government, has developed a stringent and standardized approach to security and risk assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Designed to simplify security for the digital age, FedRAMP enables Federal, state, and local government agencies to rapidly transition to mission-enabling, secure, and cost-effective cloud-based IT. Based on the widely adopted NIST SP800-53 set of security controls, FedRAMP has also achieved wide recognition among non-government consumers of IT services. Mappings are available between NIST and other popular security frameworks, allowing organizations of any type to accept FedRAMP accreditations within their risk management programs.

Aruba Central Receives Authorized FedRAMP Designation

We are excited to announce that Aruba Central, the cloud-native network management and analytics platform, has received a formal “Authorized” designation FedRAMP. Aruba Central is the only AI-powered solution for unified WLAN, switching, VPN, and cloud infrastructure to obtain FedRAMP Authorization.

Aruba has long been a leader in delivering secure networking to all parts of the Federal government. We are proud to enable secure mobility for military and civilian agencies, and the official FedRAMP Authorization for Aruba Central reflects our continued commitment to highly capable, highly secure networking as well as our confidence in our solutions.

Accreditations like FedRAMP provide assurance to our customers that an independent, Federally authorized auditing organization has inspected each of our security controls and found them sufficient. Now that FedRAMP Authorization is complete, federal IT leaders can use the AI-powered Aruba Central cloud network solution to simplify the deployment, management, and optimization of their campus, branch, remote, and data center networks and streamline workflows with centralized monitoring and control, built-in AIOps, detailed alerts and troubleshooting. Aruba Central serves as the single-pane-of-glass for Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), which empowers IT managers with AI-powered analytics, IoT device profiling for security, and unified infrastructure management.

With Aruba Central and the ESP platform, agencies can accelerate the edge-to-cloud transformation to support intelligent edge services and put computing and storage power closest to where it’s needed—whether for situational awareness, on the battlefield or for base operations.

Learn more about Aruba’s solutions, including for Federal, state, and local governments.