On Monday, we announced that a major General Services Administration application running on Appian Cloud and Amazon Web Services has been granted Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate Authorization and Accreditation. Back in 2010, an Appian Cloud application at the Department of Education was the first cloud BPM solution to be granted FISMA Low status.
This is a big deal, as federal agencies are grappling to balance cloud security concerns with Administration directives that are changing the government data center landscape. The GSA's investment in certifying the application will make it easier for other federal agencies to attain FISMA Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) designation for their Appian Cloud solutions.
The federal BPM community will gather at Appian World 2013 (April 29-May 1 in Washington, DC), and cloud BPM will be a big part of the agenda. If you are engaged in planning, evaluating, deploying or using federal cloud services, you can't afford to miss this gathering of peer practitioners and federal IT thought leaders.
According to IDC's recent report, "The Government Data Center of the Future," federal data centers are undergoing a "once-in-a-generation shift," triggered in large part by the growing emphasis on cloud computing. The Office of Management and Budget announced the federal "cloud first" policy two years ago, with targets for agency cloud adoption, and the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative will reduce the number of government data centers by about 40% by 2015. This reduction is expected to deliver up to $5 billion in savings over time, but it clearly requires greater adoption of hosted and shared federal IT services.
Appian Cloud, built on Amazon Web Services and utilizing the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), is a complete BPM suite available in the cloud as an on-demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. It provides the reliability, security and speed of deployment required to support comprehensive process solutions via a subscription model. As the FISMA Moderated accreditation attests, Appian Cloud security and management controls are hard to beat even by the strictest on-premise computing standards.
The IDC report states, "Once every 20 years or so, significant technology shifts occur, which cause a ripple effect -- deeply affecting business processes across organizations. The end result of all of these changes is that government data centers are entering a period of radical change."
The federal IT landscape is evolving rapidly. Register for Appian World 2013 today to get ahead of the curve. Sign up by Dec 31st to receive our early-bird 20% discount.
Ben Farrell
Director of Corporate Communications
