There can be no doubt that the cloud is helping to transform governments by reducing IT complexity, driving down costs, enabling faster innovation and delivering mission-critical services to citizens, in real time and on-demand. This is the central theme of this year’s AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., where CrowdStrike® is proud to participate, showcasing our efforts to help make the public sector more efficient and effective by delivering security via the cloud.
For my generation, jokes about the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) have become so cliche that they crossed a line and simply became a cultural fact. There was a time when renewing my driver’s license or registration would require carving an afternoon out of my calendar. It meant I was in for a multi-hour ritual, patiently waiting for my number to be called and desperately hoping that I could accomplish my goal with a single trip, all while worrying what my lack of productivity would cost me.
For some of us, that experience is in the past. Thanks to IT modernization, some driver’s may never need to set foot inside a DMV again. As many states move from delivering services in person to delivering them self-service from the cloud, our entire model of interacting with our government changes.
However, it’s no secret that on the whole, the government has lagged behind private enterprise when it comes to cloud adoption. Government organizations champion a different type of mission. They are not driven by profits or market share — their purpose and sole focus is on serving the public’s interest. In that role, the public sector is continuously placed under heavy scrutiny by both regulators and citizens, creating a high degree of accountability and exposure. As a result, the public sector tends to be conservative by nature, which has made this segment of our community less agile in a very fast-moving technological world.
Much of this is changing in the United States, as government begins to adopt the same technologies that have been tried, tested and proven by the largest banks, most reputable healthcare organizations and the most trusted global brands. This initiative began under the Obama administration with the “cloud first” policy first published in 2011 and continues with President Trump’s Executive Order in May 2017, emphasizing shared services. The result has been a sustained focus for the U.S. public sector on delivering more services via the cloud. In a 2017 Gartner research note titled “Get Ready for the Inflection Point in U.S. Federal Government Cloud Adoption,” the respected analyst firm stated, “Gartner estimates that U.S. federal spending on the cloud will more than double in the next four years.”* CrowdStrike believes this is great news for citizens and taxpayers, as it improves the availability of services, provides better user experiences and creates opportunities to lower costs.
FedRAMP Authorization and AWS GovCloud
It’s taken a lot more than mere policy to get us here — a great deal of hard work has transpired since this transition began. In order to ensure that the move to the cloud doesn’t introduce unwanted risks or undue amounts of bureaucratic red tape, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) developed the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). FedRAMP provides a standardized approach across the federal government for assessing security and continuous monitoring of cloud services. FedRAMP gives the U.S. public sector a standard framework for trust, that makes it simpler to adopt new cloud technologies. Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud is a fantastic success story that came from this program and CrowdStrike is proud to partner with AWS to deliver new services for the public sector out of GovCloud.
AWS GovCloud is an AWS Region designed to meet the requirements imposed by FedRAMP and other U.S. regulatory standards. GovCloud is broadly trusted by U.S. government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, as well as contractors, educational institutions and other U.S. enterprises that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.
CrowdStrike Falcon on GovCloud
CrowdStrike is proud to partner with AWS to deliver the Falcon next-gen endpoint protection platform via GovCloud: CrowdStrike Falcon
on GovCloud. This week, CrowdStrike became the first and only company to deliver endpoint security from within a trusted and scalable cloud environment that operates in compliance with the strictest U.S. regulations.
CrowdStrike strongly supports the missions of the civilian government, the DoD and the intelligence community to deliver advanced services in a cost-effective manner, while maintaining the highest level of protection for citizen data, trade secrets, intellectual property and other sensitive information.
The cloud continues to be a disruptive force in delivering services to consumers. It allowed Netflix to take the place of Blockbuster for video delivery, Amazon Kindle to overtake Barnes and Noble in books, and the iPhone to displace countless other devices in capturing photos and more. With proper security standards in place and the strong support of the private sector, entities in the public sector are now poised to take their own leaps forward.
Learn more:
- Visit the CrowdStrike Falcon on GovCloud solution page
- Read the Falcon on GovCloud FAQ
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Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself. Start your free trial of Falcon Prevent today.
*Source: Gartner, “Get Ready for the Inflection Point in U.S. Federal Government Cloud Adoption,” by Rick Holgate and Neville Cannon. Published: January 19, 2016. Refreshed June 9, 2017.
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