Acquia Cloud for Drupal Receives Government Approval via FISMA Certification

Acquia, a commercial software company that provides enterprise level products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system, recently reached another milestone confirming their company’s ability to deliver secure hosting services for government web sites and online communities. Today, the company announced that it has received a FISMA Authorization to Operate (ATO) for Acquia Cloud.

Drupal is the open source content management system used by 24% of all .Gov web sites. Some examples of United States federal government sites currently running on Drupal include the Commerce Department, The White House, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy. The Certification makes Acquia the first provider to offer an enterprise class Drupal hosting service that is FISMA moderate certified, where both the Drupal application and hosting infrastructure are supported.

FISMA and its associated National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publications establish key standards around system security and guidelines for assessing, selecting and monitoring security controls. Compliance with FISMA allows Federal agencies to more easily redesign their web sites using Drupal, while ensuring that stringent security standards and cost efficiencies are met when running on Acquia’s Cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS).  Acquia Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and utilizes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which has previously received a FISMA Moderate ATO.

“AWS’s strategic approach to serving the public sector includes working with organizations who share the same standards and aggressive goals for compliance,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services. “We are pleased that Acquia continues to be an innovator in providing AWS cloud-based software to our customers so they can benefit from the secure, scalable and cost-effective services.”

Acquia is dedicated to working with companies like AWS to exceed the high expectations that Federal agencies impose with regard to security and availability in the cloud. Further, the FISMA Moderate ATO certification demonstrates Acquia’s ability to complete the most stringent accreditation process to benefit its customers.

“We’re fully committed to ensuring that government agencies can count on Acquia to mitigate the perceived risks of moving to a cloud-based infrastructure,” said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia. “In being granted FISMA Moderate ATO, Acquia now sits at the intersection of three critical initiatives for government organizations: utilizing open source software to provide faster innovation; gaining cost efficiencies by moving to the cloud; and achieving compliance with government standards, assuring appropriate levels of security and control.”

“This effort demonstrates Acquia’s commitment to exceeding our Federal customers high expectations for security and availability in the cloud, as well as our ability to complete the stringent accreditation process,” said Mike Lemire, Acquia’s Director of Information Security.