Compliance & Regulation

FISMA Government Compliance

Term 39 of 68 in the ERPStack technical glossary

What is FISMA Government Compliance?

The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) is a United States federal law that defines a comprehensive framework to protect government information, operations, and assets against natural or man-made threats.

FISMA Government Compliance at a glance

Control catalogue: NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, finalised 23 September 2020
Categorisation: 3 impact levels — low, moderate and high — driving how many controls apply
Process: Categorise, select, implement, assess, authorise, monitor — 6 steps, continuously repeated
Evidence: Continuous monitoring, not an annual snapshot, is what the authorisation depends on
Built with: Terraform-defined AWS or Microsoft Azure infrastructure, GitHub Actions change control, Kubernetes workloads, centralised logging, Semgrep SAST and OWASP ZAP scans, Sentry for errors
Numbers that matter: NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, 23 September 2020; 3 impact levels; 6 process steps repeated continuously; 1 categorisation decision that sets everything else
Adjacent regimes: FedRAMP Security Controls, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 in commercial contexts
Commonly paired with: Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker and Kubernetes workloads, Semgrep SAST, OWASP ZAP, RBAC, SSO and centralised logging

How FISMA Government Compliance works in production

FISMA requires federal agencies and their IT contractors to implement strict security controls. Compliance involves detailed asset inventories, system vulnerability monitoring, and detailed incident response plans, adhering to NIST SP 800-53 security standards.

The ERPStack approach to FISMA Government Compliance

We build FISMA-certifiable cloud architectures using AWS GovCloud and secure enclaves, ensuring your applications pass rigorous government security reviews.

Related Resources

Frequently asked questions about FISMA Government Compliance

What does FISMA Government Compliance require?

That federal information systems are categorised by impact, protected with a selected control baseline, assessed, formally authorised and then continuously monitored. Government Compliance draws its controls from NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, finalised on 23 September 2020, and the number of applicable controls scales with the impact level assigned to the system rather than with its size.

How is the impact level determined?

By the consequences of a confidentiality, integrity or availability failure, rated low, moderate or high. Government Compliance uses that categorisation to select a control baseline, so getting it right early matters enormously — a system categorised moderate carries a substantially larger control set than one categorised low, and re-categorising late means re-doing assessment work already completed.

What does continuous monitoring mean in practice?

Evidence produced by the system rather than assembled for an audit. Government Compliance expects ongoing visibility into configuration, vulnerabilities and access, which in engineering terms means automated configuration management through Infrastructure as Code, dependency scanning in the pipeline, centralised logging and alerting. An annual manual review satisfies nobody and misses the drift that occurs between reviews.

How does FISMA relate to FedRAMP?

FedRAMP applies the same NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 control family to cloud services, with a standardised authorisation that agencies can reuse. Government Compliance for an agency system therefore often depends on the cloud services underneath already holding a FedRAMP authorisation, which is why the hosting decision constrains the compliance path more than most architectural choices do.