7 Reasons Why FedHIVE Beats the Larger CSPs For Highly Secure Government Cloud

When government agencies and contractors move their sensitive operations to the cloud, they often look first to the largest cloud service providers (CSPs) in the market — AWS, Microsoft, Google, and others. But what they may not know is that there exists a better alternative.

With FedHIVE, they can get the same high level of security and continuous monitoring offered by those other CSPs, but with much better customer service, pricing, and dramatically faster ATO (authority to operate) approvals for their cloud-based systems. Moreover, FedHIVE will even provide expert assistance to help federal agency and contractor customers find the best modernization path for them, wherever they are on their modernization journey, whether they need to develop and assess roadmap options, migrate workloads to the cloud, or get an ATO quickly for a cloud-based system.

FedHIVE (Federal High Impact Virtualized Environment) is a cloud service that is FedRAMP-authorized at the High Impact level. High Impact data is typically used in law enforcement and emergency services systems, financial systems, health systems, and other similarly sensitive mission areas that rely on the government’s most sensitive, unclassified data.

If you are a federal agency looking to quickly stand up a highly secure cloud enclave or application, or a government contractor looking to quickly get a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering through the ATO process for your federal customers, here are seven reasons to choose FedHIVE over the others for your highly secure cloud needs:

1. We meet or exceed the highest security standards available
   
   When it comes to highly secure commercial cloud, nobody beats FedHIVE. We passed the same stringent FedRAMP audit process as the larger CSPs and our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings meet or exceed the FedRAMP High Impact Baseline and DoD Cloud Computing Security requirements, delivering significant benefits to both federal agencies and contractors. (FedHIVE also complies with other security programs and policies, including DoD’s CMMC Level 3 (expected), Health-ISAC, the EU’s GDPR, NIST 800-171, and DFARS 252.204-7012.)
   
   We have a Joint Authorization Board (JAB) authorization for a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the High Impact Level, meaning our offerings are approved by the chief information officers of the Defense Department, Homeland Security Department, and the General Services Administration, and available for use at any federal agency. In other words, you can trust us with your most sensitive cloud-based information and workloads.
   
   
2. We fast-track your ATO process
   
   By leveraging our existing ATO, federal agencies can get a cloud-based application up and running fast and contractors can quickly get a new SaaS tool through the government’s arduous ATO process. We’ve already gone through the process, and our JAB ATO is intended to be repurposed many times to save time and expense. That means we can place your tool or application into our cloud enclave and have it audited as a “significant change” to our existing ATO. As a “significant change,” only one form is filled out and it takes 45 to 60 days to go through the JAB ATO process and be approved for use in any federal agency2 — far faster than going through the entire process, which can take many months. Once approved, we manage all of the security compliance and continuous monitoring required to maintain that ATO. And because the client receives a JAB-authorized ATO, there is no need to go through the cost and effort of the ATO process at each agency where the application will be in use.
   
   We also fast-track your ATO process by offering you our expert guidance, based on our experience and familiarity with the process. We can help you avoid many time-consuming and costly mistakes that are often made. Why would we? Because it serves our business case to get as many customers into the FedHIVE cloud as quickly as possible. We save you cost, we save you time, and we help you through the process. The big CSPs won’t do this for you, but we will.
   
   
3. Our high-touch customer service
   
   We go the extra mile in ensuring our customers are happy. We call this the Big Bank/Little Bank approach. Simply put, we value your business more than the larger CSPs do, so we dedicate ourselves to making sure you are successful in achieving your objectives, whether you are a government agency or contractor. If there is a problem or question, we are always just a phone call away, ready and available to assist. Even if you already use the larger CSPs, there may be some cloud projects that are more complicated or need more attention than others — that’s where FedHIVE’s great customer service can be especially helpful.
   
   
4. Our highly competitive and transparent costs
   
   FedHIVE disrupts traditional cloud pricing models by making our costs transparent and doing away with transactional fees and hidden fees that many other CSPs often charge. We give customers a true understanding of what their costs will be. Moreover, we also advise clients on how to gain greater efficiencies in their cloud usage while still meeting the mission.
   
   
5. No vendor lock-in
   
   FedHIVE offers complete data portability. We have no proprietary tools or penalties or exit fees — as are often seen with larger CSPs — to prevent customers from moving data and applications elsewhere if they choose. For contractors, if you put your SaaS offerings in FedHIVE, you are not tied down to us — you can put those same offerings in other clouds as well.
   
   
6. We take over your security compliance burden
   
   Many federal agencies and government contractors prefer to just focus on developing new products, delivering services, and meeting their mission and business demands. They simply don’t have the technical resources, skill sets, or interest in managing their security compliance requirements. That’s what we excel at, so let us handle it for you. With FedHIVE, you can be confident that your continuous monitoring and information security requirements are being managed well.
   
   
7. We are highly customizable
   
   Customers can adopt as many of our security controls as they wish, or use their own, depending on their unique mission and business needs. They can also choose from a variety of available service models (for example, PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, managed service provider, and hybrid) and deployment models (such as by starting with a pilot project or proof of concept and then modernizing in phases as needed). And while we are a certified HUBZone Small Business, FedHIVE can accommodate the full range of business and mission needs for any agency. For over 20 years, we have supported large-scale DoD-wide projects touching petabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of end users to a single program implementation at a small agency.

To learn more about FedHIVE, contact us at info@FedHIVE.com or 715-FED-HIVE.

¹ Controlled Unclassified Information, Personally Identifiable Information, and Protected Health Information.
² Each agency has the option to impose security controls beyond those embodied in the FedRAMP process.