Verizon gets ATO for federal enterprise cloud services

The General Services Administration added Verizon Enterprise Solutions' cloud-computing platform to its list of cloud services providers that have authority to operate under its Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.

The company said its Enterprise Cloud: Federal Edition (ECFE) is an infrastructure as a service solution, backed by geographically diverse, enterprise class architecture. The ATO came through the Department of Health and Human Services and brings the total number of cloud service providers with agency-backed authorization to nine.

The pool of ATO-approved cloud service providers is relatively small, but growing. GSA's acting director of FedRAMP, Matthew Goodrich, told FCW in a recent interview that in the next six months, one of the key areas of focus will be to engage with agencies directly and help them complete more ATOs.

ECFE, according to Verizon and GSA, is delivered from data centers in Culpeper, Va., and Miami, where core infrastructure components are shared by government customers. Those facilities, according to GSA's FedRAMP-approved vendor list, have multiple layers of facility, security, power and ventilation redundancy, and are protected by guards, with continuous physical and virtual surveillance. It is available, said Verizon, in multitenant and dedicated configurations.

ECFE gives government customers the capability to provision virtual servers, storage, virtual load balancers and virtual firewalls for the deployment of their specific applications, said Verizon.

"We are seeing accelerating interest in cloud computing across our public sector business, and achieving FedRAMP authorization underscores our commitment to providing reliable, flexible and high-performance on-demand computing solutions that enable the business of government," Michael Maiorana, senior vice president of public sector markets, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said in a Nov. 6 statement.