When it comes to tech compliance in federal agencies, there are two acronyms that any company is bound to encounter: NIST and FedRAMP. The two terms and what they represent can be quite confusing for newcomers. Here, we have compiled a quick, easy guide to help you understand the difference between NIST and FedRAMP.
What Is NIST?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) creates and regulates standards and guidelines relating to information security. It publishes a series of Special Publications—the 800 series. These publications detail information security/privacy controls that need to be in place for information systems in the US federal government. The work of NIST relates to two federal laws: the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) and the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (also FISMA, which enhances and clarifies the original law). Basically, these laws require US government agencies to implement security controls in their IT systems.
NIST produces the standards and practices to implement the government’s IT security controls. Therefore, in order to comply with the two FISMA laws, you must comply with NIST. NIST’s Special Publications cover a wide array of topics on security, engineering, risk management, wireless, etc. Therefore, government agencies and government programs leverage the NIST standards to be able to build and secure all of their systems through a risk management framework.
How Does FedRAMP Figure Into This?
FedRAMP is the risk management framework. It is a life cycle base framework for the development, securing, and ultimately, the authorization of government IT systems. So, FedRAMP operates alongside NIST. The acronym stands for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. FedRAMP applies the FISMA security standards needed in all federal IT systems to the specific requirements of cloud-based operations. Moreover, it offers a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services. Essentially, following the stipulations of FedRAMP enables you to keep your cloud services in line with federal security requirements.
To sum up, government agencies and government contractors use NIST to ensure the security of US Government information in US Government systems. NIST provides standards and guidelines for risk management, information security, and privacy controls for systems used by the federal government. FedRAMP applies the NIST guidelines to enable US government agencies to use cloud services safely and efficiently.
What is FedRAMP?
FedRAMP is a framework through which service providers of Cloud systems can implement required government security standards. These include government cloud systems or privately owned and operated cloud systems. Succinctly, the FedRAMP framework is used for assessment purposes. For a Cloud system created by a service provider to gain authorization to store government data, it must be assessed and authorized using the FedRAMP framework. For someone who is new to the security field or interested in the security field, it is important to know that this is the process used to develop and provide government standards for IT and security. In other words, government agencies and government contractors need to adhere to these standards to develop their Security Programs.
In other words, cloud service providers that want to sell their services to government agencies and to government contractors use FedRAMP to assess, authorize and qualify their products for NIST compliance in order to store government data securely. There are certifications that are available for training Cloud Security Professionals on this federal standard.
Consec Solutions can help your organization ensure NIST and FedRAMP compliance if you are working within or in affiliation with US government agencies. Contact us for more information on the difference between NIST and FedRAMP. Learn how we can help you apply these standards to your systems.
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