QTS Takes Major Step Toward FedRAMP Compliance

QTS has gotten one step closer to being qualified as a cloud provider who’s secure and compliant enough to serve agencies of the U.S. federal government.

The company has been designated the FedRAMP Ready status, which means it has gone through some preliminary steps of the FedRAMP process and is now ready to initiate the FedRAMP authorization process.

FedRAMP is a set of security standards the government has put in place to streamline adoption of cloud services by its agencies. To date, 16 companies have been certified as compliant FedRAMP cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM, HP and Oracle, among others.

QTS is joining a short list of FedRAMP Ready service providers. Others on the list are CA Technologies, OnCloud, PegaCloud, Project Hosts and IBM SoftLayer.

“By being designated as FedRAMP Ready, the QTS Federal Cloud is positioned to quickly initiate an assessment and obtain a FedRAMP authority-to-operate from a federal agency customer,” Matthew Goodrich, acting FedRAMP director at the General Services Administration, said in a statement.

QTS hosts its Federal Cloud infrastructure – brought online in early 2014 – at its Richmond, Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia, data centers. In 2013, the company established a lab at the massive Richmond facility dedicated to developing cloud solutions specifically for federal clients.