Department of Veterans Affairs Issues AWS a FISMA High General Support System ATO

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has issued Amazon Web Services (AWS) a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) High General Support System Authority to Operate (ATO) for AWS GovCloud (US), as well as a FISMA Moderate GSS ATO for the US East and West Regions.

This validation of a secure environment to run highly sensitive government workloads is important to the VA since they work with patient data, and protecting this data is critical to their mission to make a difference for Veterans. The FISMA High ATO for AWS GovCloud (US) will allow the VA to continue leveraging the cloud to enable their mission.

“We are honored to team with the VA on their journey to the cloud. VA’s decision to embrace cloud will have a positive, direct impact on our Veterans, as IT costs are reduced while functionality increases. We look forward to continuing this critical effort with the VA,” said Doug VanDyke, General Manager, Civilian Government & Nonprofits, Amazon Web Services Worldwide Public Sector.

Moving to the cloud brings many benefits to the VA including:

• Efficient and modern digital experiences
• Cost-savings by provisioning servers on-demand
• Rapid software and product development and deployment cycles
• Modern service-delivery capability
• Zero downtime maintenance windows
• Increased operational flexibility
• Faster identification and resolution of security issues

In addition to a FISMA High General Support System ATO from the VA, AWS GovCloud (US) has also received a P-ATO from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High baseline. And recently, the Region received a JAB-issued FedRAMP High P-ATO for three new services: Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle, and PostgresSQL, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and AWS CloudTrail.