VMware’s Government Cloud Gets FedRAMP Certification

VMware’s vCloud Government Service has achieved FedRAMP certification, which means government agencies can now use the service that has been officially confirmed to meet standard government security requirements.

VMware’s government cloud service, provided by its partner Carpathia out if its data centers, joins a relatively short list of FedRAMP-certified cloud service providers. Others on the list include Akamai, AT&T, HP, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Verizon, and QTS.

The government created FedRAMP to fast-track adoption of cloud services by its agencies. Instead of each agency individually evaluating different vendors to make sure they are compliant with security requirements, the can just pick a service from the list of pre-screened vendors.

VMware’s government cloud received the certification Tuesday, according to the FedRAMP website.

Chris Wolf, CTO of the Americas at VMware:

VMware’s government cloud services are similar to its services for civilians. The company is offering seamless integration between the customer’s own data center and VMware’s multi-tenant cloud hosted in the provider’s facilities (in the government cloud’s case, in Carpathia’s facilities).

So far, no public cloud provider has been able to beat Amazon Web Services in the amount of Infrastructure-as-a-Service business it does with federal agencies (or in the private sector for that matter). VMware is a very serious contender in this space because of the ubiquity of its data center software in customers’ data centers.

Users often want to keep some of their infrastructure in-house but integrate it with public cloud for elasticity. If VMware can convince federal IT leaders that it’s better for them to extend their in-house environments with its cloud services than with AWS or others’, it wins.