How to do FedRAMP the Wrong Way 

A lovingly sarcastic field guide to burning time, money, and morale 

Let’s start with the myth that refuses to die: FedRAMP ATOs take 18–24 months and cost $3–5M.

If you follow the classic FedRAMP advisory playbook, sure. You’ll spend months on a gap assessment, commission a reference architecture that looks gorgeous in PowerPoint, and then sink quarters into R&D trying to interpret every control like it’s Renaissance poetry. Damn it, what the hell is a Prince of Cats!? Cue the consultant parade and the endless gap analyses. Cue roadmaps to hell. Cue the realization that you’ve made poor career choices. And the absolute worst—cue the invoices!!

If your organization is the beneficiary of billions in angel investment capital because you’ve created the thing everyone cannot live without, by all means proceed. For everyone else, there’s a better way.

The Wrong Way | A Quick Checklist for Maximum Pain

If you recognize your program in any of the above… stackArmor can help!

The Right Way Through Compliance Engineering | ATO-ready in ~6 months, < $750k

What changes the game isn’t a fancier slide deck, it’s engineering. Start with a pre-engineered landing zone. Then add integrated security controls, and follow with automated continuous monitoring so you’re collecting evidence as you go, not as an afterthought.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Start with a secure landing zone instead of a blank cloud.
  Inherit hardened baselines, segmented networks, encryption-by-default, logging, and access patterns mapped to the control families. To see this in practice, check out The Armory.
• Wire in controls once, then use them everywhere.
  Guardrails for identity, network, data, and workload protection are templated and reusable.
• Make evidence self-generating.
  Pull live telemetry, configuration states, and scan results into a single source of truth so auditors see “show-me” proof rather than static screenshots. That’s what our ThreatAlert® ATO Accelerator does out of the box.
• Automate ConMon on Day 1.
  Treat continuous monitoring as part of your deployment pipeline, not a Phase 7 add-on.
• Scope like a surgeon.
  Define a crisp authorization boundary, inherit what’s inheritable, and remove everything else from the blast radius. The smaller the boundary, the better life will be—I promise.

When you take this approach, your net result becomes realistic ATO-readiness in approximately six months for under $750k (scope-dependent but repeatable), with a security posture that manages risk and isn’t simply performative.

A 6-Month, No-Drama Path | Moving Teams Through the Process

Step 1 (Month 0–1) | Information Gathering and Gaps

Ensure your workload can be deployed securely and meet FedRAMP requirements.

• The stackArmor team performs information gathering based on existing artifacts and workload architecture.
• A detailed gap assessment is conducted, outputting a report highlighting any compliance issues or showstoppers.
• A detailed architecture diagram is created to represent the deployment of the workload in ThreatAlert^®.

Step 2 (Month 2–3) | Deployment

• The ThreatAlert General Support System (GSS) and landing zone are deployed via Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• The authorization package is developed leveraging pre-defined, machine-readable artifacts.
• The workload is then deployed with full engineering support and security services configuration (e.g., vulnerability scanning, asset inventory, alert routing, etc.).

Step 3 (Month 4) | Operation & ConMon

• Automations are fine-tuned to accommodate unique system needs and operational requirements.
• Organization personnel are trained on the operation of automation and process-as-code.
• Live control checks are initiated, along with system baselining.

Step 4 (Month 5) | Pre-Assess & Tune

• The system is given a dry run with process as code.
• Gaps are remediated quickly because… automation.

Step 5 (Month 6) | Submit with Confidence

By the sixth month, you’re validating controls from live system state—not out-of-date, static evidence. This greatly reduces the audit burden and frees your engineers to concentrate on the service they were hired to provide, instead of taking screenshots like interns.

Why this costs less (and works better):

• Reuse beats reinvention. The landing zone and guardrails are pre-engineered. You tailor, not invent.
• Evidence is generated, not gathered.  Automation kills the screenshot economy and spreadsheet sprawl.
• Fewer hours interpreting controls. More hours can be dedicated to actually enforcing them.

“But my system is special.”

You’re dang right it is! And every system has quirks. That’s why stackArmor starts with a repeatable core (landing zone + controls + telemetry) and supplements with an engineering team that is second to none.

Our team lives day-in and day-out in the world of authorization and it shows. We work with your system’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to understand the workload and tailor the part of the environment that’s actually unique so that you have a completely compliant, entirely secure landing zone that meets your business needs. You keep your architecture where it matters; we remove the undifferentiated heavy compliance lifting everywhere else.

Parting Advice (from someone who’s seen too many burn-downs):

• If your plan starts with a 12-week gap assessment, you’re already behind.
• If your evidence lives in screenshots, you’re already stale.
• If your ConMon isn’t automated, it’s not continuous.

Skip the museum tour. Build the system, wire the controls, and let the evidence collect itself. And as a bonus benefit for the bean counters, a FedRAMP program that costs less makes it easier for your sales team to sell and deliver profitability!

Copyright © 2025 stackArmor, Inc., a Tyto Athene Company. All rights reserved. All other trademarks not owned by stackArmor are the property of their respective owners, who may or may not be affiliated with, connected to, or sponsored by stackArmor. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any stackArmor product or solution.