Challenges Agencies Face When They Bring New Technologies and Processes to ATO

An Authorization to Operate (ATO) is a permit that federal agencies need to acquire before they can implement any new software system, as set forth under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). It serves as proof that an agency passed a federally approved process to safeguard an IT system from security threats such as malware, cyberattacks, security breaches, and phishing attempts. ATO documentation is also used in security audits of agency systems to ensure that the security controls continue to be compliant, maintained, and monitored effectively and efficiently.

Obtaining an ATO can be a long and tedious undertaking, and agencies often look to new technologies and processes that can help address the challenges of ATO processing.

Challenge No. 1: Identifying Baseline Security Controls — Security testing must be moved to the start of the process, incorporating it into the requirements and system design. Agencies must identify tools and practices that they can fully integrate throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Challenge Np. 2: Implementing Security Controls — Leverage automation to achieve a successful security implementation. Ensure that all updates to your system pass through a standardized security check. Create cases using different attack vectors and test them. Automation allows agencies to check engineering activities while maintaining security processes. As systems may also have third-party libraries and frameworks, agencies need controls that can monitor and identify vulnerabilities within these components as well.

Challenge No. 3: Monitoring System Security — All efforts in identifying baseline security controls and automation will be pointless without a monitoring and reporting solution in place. Without visibility into the process, it is difficult to identify opportunities to adjust and optimize the system. Metrics such as vulnerability counts, mean-time-to-detect, and mean-time-to-respond provide essential insights into the status of security implementation.

Challenge No. 4: Prolonged Timelines — An ATO can take anywhere between 6-18 months to complete. This can stifle change and make applications stale. The prolonged timeline also delays rolling out of innovations that create business value and increases system risk to an agency.

To address these challenges, government agencies must partner with service providers that can help them through the full ATO processing lifecycle. Agency decision makers should look for service providers with the following qualifications:

For more than 20 years, AO’S award-winning team has provided federal agencies, commercial businesses, and nonprofit organizations with agile, innovative, and collaborative technology solutions. Our federal customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of State, and Department of Navy, among many others.

At AO, we have been helping our clients reduce the time to ATO by combining our cybersecurity , intelligent automation, and agile competencies. As a result, our customers have benefitted through reduction of time and cost associated with ATOs; achieved consistency in results and continuous compliance and monitoring; decreased system risk to the agency; and accelerated time to achieving and maintaining ATOs.

Alpha Omega Integration built A2O™ to address the lifecycle of the ATO process from gathering and evaluating the necessary controls based on the system’s security profile, to identifying exceptions in security posture and monitor controls. Built on and in collaboration with the industry leading automation vendor UiPath, A2O™ takes a continuous automation approach to ATO by automating collection of data from manual controls executing the controls, identifying gaps, and increasing observability and transparency, through technical and operational dashboards.

For more information on A2O™ and how partnering with us can make it easier for your agency
to achieve an ATO, visit the AOI website: https://alphaomega.com