Many enterprise technology companies see the US government market as a whale, with expectations built on half-truths and stories of the “biggest deal in our history” from peers and competitors. As macroeconomic conditions force companies to pursue new markets, there is increased interest in the US government market. But as those who’ve read Moby Dick know, catching whales can be dangerous business.

The US government IT market is in fact huge, with more than $110B spent last year in the federal civilian and DOD markets. As the US government’s mission has increasingly digitized, so has its reliance on commercial technology. Historically, the US government led the world in technology R&D, funding the development of innovations that we take for granted today, from GPS to the internet itself.  But in the early 1980s that started to change. Starting around 1983, commercial R&D eclipsed government investment and the gap has only grown since. As technology and software increasingly define everything we do, this makes logical sense. But as the US government’s mission is increasingly tech-enabled, commercial innovation (R&D) is now an essential component of US government mission success. And much of that required innovation is delivered today in the cloud as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

This is where FedRAMP comes in. FedRAMP is the US government’s program to ensure cloud-delivered technology complies with a host of requirements and cybersecurity controls. With 323 controls at the moderate impact level, it’s not for the faint of heart. Anecdotally, it’s easy to find companies who have spent several years and millions of dollars in an attempt to comply with these controls and enter this key market. It’s just as easy to find companies that have made similar investments and failed. It doesn’t have to be this way.

We built Constellation to connect mission with innovation. We believe in the FedRAMP program and the cybersecurity goals that it seeks to achieve. We also believe that emerging technology companies have many competing priorities and if FedRAMP compliance is too risky and expensive, they will focus elsewhere.

Constellation serves both parties by providing a highly-secure managed service where SaaS companies can quickly deploy their applications in a FedRAMP-authorized environment.  By removing over 80% of the overall effort, Constellation accelerates these SaaS technologies into a compliant and authorized state, making them rapidly available for those mission customers that rely on this critical commercial innovation and accelerating the fuel that these companies need to keep innovating – revenue.

*Sources: whitehouse.gov, gao.gov. Illustration originally sourced from CSIS