System Designers

Where do you fit each journey phase?

Existing Product SMEs, Solution Architects, and Expert Witnesses 

In the Pathfinding phase, you help define system boundaries, evaluate existing infrastructure, and identify the largest and most expensive gaps to addressing FedRAMP requirements.

During the Solution Building, you need to intimately understand FedRAMP controls, requirements, and guidance interpretations controls, and integrate these controls into the system architecture.

In the Assessment Preparation phase, you are critical in conducting self-assessments, fixing identified security gaps, and preparing comprehensive documentation to demonstrate compliance. Finally, during the assessment process, you will be interviewed by 3PAO auditors, offering clarifications and demonstrating how the system meets the security requirements.

The skills you'll need at each phase are:

Pathfinding:

• System Evaluation
• Risk Assessment
• Intimate FedRAMP Requirements Understanding

Solution Building:

• System Admin/Developer Skills Needed to Implement Requirements
• System Architecture
• System Integration

Assessment Preparation:

• Self-Assessment Against FedRAMP Requirements
• System Documentation and Procedure Writing
• Communication to Non-Technical Audiences

What pitfalls and challenges can you expect?

As a technical expert on your product, your role is to advise on the impacts of required system changes, and find solutions to ensure continued operations in a way that meets FedRAMP requirements. What can you expect from each phase? The keys to success are understanding where requirements are and are not flexible, and flexible IT expertise to reduce the cscope, cost, and timeline of system changes.

Pitfalls

• Misinterpretation of FedRAMP requirements that lead to misperceptions of required changes
• Poor integration of new tools or design changes that negatively impact business operations
• Poor documentation and/or communication of system operation processes and design, leading to confused assessors

Challenges

• Accurately defining the system boundary
• Managing changes in a timeframe that does not negatively impact customers or business operations
• Gathering and maintaining evidence for each control, for every representative group of system components in the FedRAMP environment

Course Offerings

Easy-to-follow courses, on your own time

Our courses are designed to save you expensive consulting hours to get you comfortable with the bare basics a system architect, engineer, or administrator needs to know. You might opt to include honest stories and lessons learned from someone who has successfully navigated the process end-to-end and helped many others achieve the same.

Check out our free learnings, or some excerpts from each program tier to see the Vanaheim difference.