VMware announced VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) has achieved FedRAMP Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) at the High Impact Level. FedRAMP is a mandatory U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach and baseline requirements for security assessment, authorization, and monitoring of cloud products. FedRAMP recognizes VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud for adhering to stringent performance, security, and compliance standards. With this authorization, U.S. public sector agencies can now seamlessly migrate and more quickly modernize their VMware vSphere workloads with VMware Cloud and AWS GovCloud US.

"Achieving this certification for VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) is a significant testament to the value that government agencies can realize by moving to the cloud," said Lynn Martin, vice president of government, education, and healthcare at VMware. "VMware recognizes the large investments the government has made and is committed to helping them move faster to gain more agility as well as flexibility in moving workloads to multi-cloud environments."

Federal, civilian, and defense agencies depend on AWS and VMware technology to modernize and more efficiently run government operations, support anywhere workforce strategies, and deliver traditional and modern digital services to citizens. Federal agencies, like U.S. Marshals Service, the FedRAMP ATO sponsor, have included the VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud service as a component within their multi-cloud strategy.

VMware Cloud on AWS provides public sector IT teams an on-demand, scalable hybrid cloud service that enables them to seamlessly extend, migrate and protect their infrastructure in the cloud. AWS is VMware's preferred public cloud collaborator for vSphere-based workloads, and VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud is the preferred AWS public cloud service for vSphere-based workloads. VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud is jointly engineered and sold by VMware and AWS, delivering the best of both worlds to government agencies - VMware's proven cloud infrastructure and cloud management technology available on the AWS cloud, with optimized access to native AWS services.

"As part of our commitment to deliver technologies that help our customers operate more efficiently, we are pleased VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud achieved the FedRAMP High authorization, which will give agencies a simplified path to move their highly sensitive workloads to the cloud," said Sandy Carter, Vice President of Partners and Programs, AWS. "U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies from law enforcement and emergency services to financial and healthcare systems can now confidently leverage the best of VMware and AWS to more securely run their mission critical applications across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments to take full advantage of the cloud's agility and cost savings."

VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud supports critical public sector use cases, including application and cloud migration and modernization, data center extension, disaster recovery as a service, and virtual desktop infrastructure. Agencies can deploy complete VMware Cloud environments of integrated compute, network, storage, and management running in AWS GovCloud in a matter of hours, and scale capacity on demand in minutes without the need to buy new hardware. VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, which is optimized to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure to better protect highly sensitive government workloads with hardened security. The service provides full operational consistency with on-premises vSphere environments to enable fast and simple bi-directional workload portability, with the ability to leverage and extend established on-premises enterprise security, governance, and operational policies to applications and workloads running in AWS GovCloud.