Cloud approval can cost over $2 million

Although it can be tricky to arrive at a baseline cost estimate for cloud service providers to obtain authority-to-operate certification, the program's manager said about $2.25 million would do it.

In a Sept. 8 blog post, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program Director Matt Goodrich cited that number as the median cost midrange CSPs spent on their efforts to get an ATO. The cost "splits pretty cleanly with about 50 percent of that being on engineering costs and 50 percent on the process itself," he added.

CSPs can expect to spend an additional $1 million a year to maintain their security posture under continuous monitoring, according to Goodrich.

However, he said the differences among CSPs make it difficult to come up with common cost estimates.

"One of the reasons this is a hard question to answer is that comparing cloud providers to each other isn't even like trying to compare apples to oranges -- those are both at least fruit," he said.

Even among similar vendors, Goodrich said costs can vary tremendously, with one CSP paying $500,000 and another spending more than $4 million on their efforts to obtain an ATO.

However, the big cost areas for CSPs should be balanced against the benefits, he added. For instance, bringing in outside consultants to help with documentation could increase upfront costs but decrease the amount that needs to be spent on later reviews by third-party assessment organizations and the Joint Authorization Board.

Goodrich added that third-party assessments can take one to six months, with obvious increases in costs as the process lengthens.

Furthermore, companies that had to retrofit their systems to meet FedRAMP requirements incurred greater costs than companies that built their systems with federal security requirements in mind, he said.