Telos Corporation and Sequoia Holdings Inc. have entered a partnership to streamline the process of authorizing software used on the intelligence community’s commercial cloud.
The agreement, announced on Tuesday, brings together Telos’ Xacta 360 automated cloud compliance system with Sequoia’s automating infrastructure environment. The partnership is meant to help the evaluation of potential independent software vendors (ISVs) before their products are onboarded into the Amazon [AMZN] Web Services’ (AWS) commercial cloud services (C2S) cloud for use by organizations such as the CIA and National Security Agency.
The partnership was finalized on Aug. 18, and Sequoia has already begun running the Xacta 360 system in its proprietary automated environment, called Combine.
“The intelligence community and software vendors alike stand to benefit from a more robust C2S marketplace,” Telos Chief Executive and Chairman John B. Wood said in a statement. “Compliance is no longer a hurdle to system implementation – it has become a mission enabler.”
For vendors looking to sell the intelligence community on their software products, the Telos/Sequoia partnership aims to accelerate the approval process by providing an unclassified C2S testing environment and security implementation guidelines. The Xacta 360 system in Combine will evaluate potential software against the cloud’s risk management framework.
“This partnership is focused on streamlining software authorizations in the AWS C2S cloud environment, which benefits both the ISVs and the C2S customers. The overall customer service an ISV is able to provide to their C2S customer is enhanced when the ISV can leverage Combine to duplicate and test in an unclassified environment to flush out problems,” a representative for Telos told Defense Daily.
Telos’ Xacta system incorporates information technology risk management and compliance solutions to conduct continuous authorization and security monitoring. Sequoia’s Combine environment is used to develop and maintain operation resources used within AWS cloud services.