Government’s First Open Source PaaS Service Comes to Market

Autonomic Resources keeps on setting firsts in the government’s cloud computing market.

The North Carolina-based cloud service provider was the first to meet the government’s cloud computing security requirements and those required for Defense Department workloads, and now it’s the first to provide an open source platform-as-a-service offering to the federal market.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program office announced today Autonomic Resources, acquired by CSC earlier this year, has achieved FedRAMP compliance for its ARCWRX (pronounced “Arc Works”) PaaS offering.

ARCWRX is built on Red Hat's OpenShift and already has significant interest from several federal agencies, according to John Keese, director of government cloud solutions for CSC. 

Infrastructure-as-a-service offerings currently dominate the federal cloud computing market, but Keese said PaaS offerings will only grow in popularity among federal agencies as security fears about cloud diminish.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology definition for PaaS is: “The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.”

Shortened, PaaS puts more security onus on cloud services providers than infrastructure-as-a-service offerings do, and that’s attractive for government customers who often lack information security expertise or have reduced budgets.

(Image via vasabii/Shutterstock.com)