Cybersecurity Asset Management Platform’s Journey to Becoming FedRAMP Compliant

At a glance

• Company: A leading cybersecurity asset management platform that helps IT and security teams understand and monitor the assets on their networks.
• Challenge: Recurring critical and high vulnerabilities in Alpine Linux and an outdated Ubuntu 20 kept causing the company to fail its FedRAMP certification audit.
• Alternative considered: Upgrading Ubuntu and migrating from Alpine Linux to Ubuntu, a resource-intensive project.
• Result: Patched versions for every vulnerability FedRAMP required, delivered within the first weeks and continuously after that, and a passed FedRAMP audit.

The backdrop

The company's goal was to achieve and maintain FedRAMP compliance. Since the end of 2023, its FedRAMP certification audits had repeatedly flagged vulnerabilities.

A security bottleneck

FedRAMP compliance is crucial for the company to serve a large market of government customers. It runs two Linux distributions, Alpine Linux and Ubuntu, and both were blocking compliance.

Critical and high vulnerabilities were found in third-party libraries on Alpine Linux. The company's Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool did not detect all of them, but AWS scanning did, and Alpine's updates for these third-party fixes took months to arrive.

The company was also running Ubuntu 20 while the latest release was Ubuntu 24. Upgrading risked breaking existing functionality, a common problem for teams stuck on older versions. Vulnerabilities in the outdated release were flagged during FedRAMP audits, pushing the company toward an upgrade and a migration from Alpine Linux to Ubuntu.

Business impact

Repeated FedRAMP audit failures cost the company business opportunities, and the required upgrades and migration would have pulled substantial time from the development team.

The turning point with Seal Security

With Seal Security, the company received patched versions for all vulnerabilities required by FedRAMP within the first weeks of use, and continuously after that. It passed the FedRAMP audit for its Linux distributions without costly upgrades or migrations.

Conclusion

The development team could concentrate on innovation and growth while the security team managed vulnerabilities with confidence. Passing FedRAMP opened a new market for the company: selling its services to government agencies.

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See it on your own stack

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