Oracle Corporation [ORCL] has achieved compliance under the General Services Administration’s (GSA) program for approving cloud service providers to the federal government, an email from the program’s project management office said Monday. 
Oracle will join 11 other organizations approved under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Oracle Federal Managed Cloud Services received its Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) after working with third-party auditor Coalfire. All cloud providers interested in becoming FedRAMP certified must work with one of 27 pre-approved audit firms that ensure the provider meets criteria from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST 800-53).
Oracle will provide PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) through community and private clouds. On its
FedRAMP page, the company said it will be providing hosting, applications management, infrastructure support, and operation and maintenance. Its primary services will include hardware and facilities setup/configuration, application management, testing, monitoring, patching, incident management, problem resolution, technical and functional service desk, point upgrades, security, and disaster recovery.
FedRAMP began operating in 2012 to help federal agencies move from legacy systems to virtualization in the cloud. The program was a result of the “Cloud First” strategy from the White House encouraging federal agencies to use cost-effective commercially available cloud services. FedRAMP is also intended to standardize cloud IT and has been credited for providing certainty about requirements to companies looking to work with the government. GSA has set the deadline of June 2014 for cloud service providers to be FedRAMP approved or in process.
FedRAMP has been aimed at civilian agencies seeking cloud services. The Department of Defense is currently leveraging FedRAMP standards and adding to them to provide cloud services to its agencies. The Defense Information Systems Agency is being stood up as the Pentagon’s cloud broker.