FedPlatform.org Focuses on a Government PaaS

  

With GSA now issuing ATOs and Amazon launching it's own government specific cloud, IaaS for government agencies is now a reality.  This next step in this "Cloud First" march is a consistent platform on which agencies can securely develop their applications.

To focus on this requirement, FedPlatform.org has been formed as a collaborative initiative to help federal organizations safely learn about and evaluate PaaS technologies. The initiative supports the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy and the Federal CIO’s 25-Point Federal IT Reform Plan, which suggests that cloud technologies provide new efficiencies and substantial cost savings. The FedPlatform.org mission is to facilitate implementations that adhere to rapidly evolving cloud computing standards, with a heavy focus on interoperability, portability and security.

FedPlatform also aims to provide a common security model for federal software systems that leverages the platform.  In doing so, it provides major security advantages over disparate stovepipe security models.
Platforms as a Service incorporate a common role-based access control (RBAC) engine for managing users, workshops, roles, privileges, and memberships. It supports timeouts, strong passwords, password expirations, appropriate encryptions, and RSA tokens. SSL is also available. The hosting can be fully managed on Amazon’s EC2, a GSA IaaS platform or even on an agency's own infrastructure. They are also making available a collection of tools and resources to help advance organizations from prototyping through production environments on private, community, hybrid or public clouds.

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