What is FISMA compliance?
FISMA compliance includes the processes, controls, and protocols an organization implements to ensure that its information assets meet requirements from the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).
Below, you’ll learn the foundational pillars of FISMA compliance, as well as how to overcome challenges and implement standards for your organization’s cloud security.
Who should be FISMA compliant?
US federal agencies and contractors that process federal information must adhere to FISMA regulations. FISMA forms part of Congress’s broader E-Government Act of 2002, which aims to improve electronic government service management in the United States.
These US government regulations promote an optimized security and privacy management approach by helping government agencies balance risk mitigation and cost. To achieve this, FISMA requires measures that match the level of risk to the agency’s data and the potential impact of a harmful event, such as unauthorized access or service disruption.
Your organization can meet these requirements by adopting best practices, effective standards, and a platform to maintain a compliant security posture. In the example below, you can see how a security professional can efficiently manage security standards with a cloud security platform.
The components of FISMA
FISMA is not a single set of universal standards and guidelines. Instead, it’s a multi-tiered collection of components that organizations implement based on the nature of the information they store and process.
Let’s look at the most critical components:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800 Series
NIST SP 800-53
NIST SP 800-53 catalogs technical and operational measures to protect government information's integrity, confidentiality, and security. The framework divides these measures into three categories based on baseline controls and the protected data’s security risk level.
The standard includes 20 control families with more than 1,000 controls and control enhancements. It covers a comprehensive range of security responsibilities, including access control, configuration management, incident response, risk assessment, and system and service acquisition.
All federal agencies and contractors or subcontractors with access to federal information systems must use NIST SP 800-53.
NIST SP 800-171
NIST SP 800-171, which provides another set of security and privacy controls, is a subset of NIST SP 800-53 with fewer security requirements. It, too, helps organizations safeguard information across the federal data supply chain.
Federal agencies and private contractors that store or process controlled unclassified information in their systems must comply with NIST SP 800-171. Failing to implement this standard could jeopardize federal contracts or lead to audits.
The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)
These regulations set higher expectations for computer system security standards. Failure to properly categorize systems can lead to unsecured assets and increased vulnerability to breaches.
FIPS 199
FIPS 199 categorizes federal information based on the likely impact of losing confidentiality, integrity, or availability:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Low impact | Any event would have relatively limited ramifications |
| Moderate impact | An incident could have an adverse effect on operations, assets, or people |
| High impact | The consequences could be catastrophic, such as a major financial loss or severe harm to individuals |
While the impact level varies among the above three criteria, the most severe level determines the security category for that particular information system.
FIPS 200
FIPS 200 maps your organization’s security objectives to FISMA compliance requirements. Organizations use it alongside FIPS 199 to select the appropriate NIST SP 800-53 baseline security controls for their information systems.
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The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)
FedRAMP adapts FISMA for governmental use of cloud service providers (CSPs).
The program divides requirements into controls—one for the CSP and the other for the federal agency or contractor using its services. This approach streamlines FISMA compliance and eliminates unnecessary responsibility duplications.
Federal agencies or contractors must use a CSP with FedRAMP authorization to ensure full data security compliance and meet their own FedRAMP obligations.
High-level FISMA requirements
FISMA provides a series of requirements to ensure security compliance:
Keep an inventory of information systems: Maintain an up-to-date record of all the salient information systems under your control. You should include integrations with any third-party systems in this inventory.
Categorize risks: Use FIPS 199 guidelines to determine the risk category for each system in your inventory.
Implement security controls: Select the baseline controls you’ll need to protect each categorized family of data for your systems using FIPS 199 and FIPS 200.
Assess risk and refine controls: Identify potential cyber threats and vulnerabilities in your systems and assess whether the controls you’ve implemented mitigate these risks.
Develop a system security plan (SSP): Create a document that details your security policies and controls, including a roadmap for implementing additional controls. Be sure to review and update the SSP regularly for annual compliance validation.
Conduct annual security reviews: Validate cloud compliance by conducting annual reviews to ensure that controls operate correctly, meet minimum security requirements, and align with data risks. Information system managers must submit review results to a senior-level agency official, who will authorize system use or request further changes.
Continuously monitor information systems: Commit to ongoing information system monitoring by using continuous monitoring to assess your security controls’ effectiveness over time and determine if changes are necessary.
4 challenges in achieving FISMA compliance
As you improve and maintain FISMA compliance, you’ll face these four common obstacles:
1. Complex regulatory landscape
As with many government compliance environments, expectations and regulations can change. Not only are these changes inevitable due to changing administrations and lawmakers, but they also aren't easy to implement—especially as your organization grows, begins using more complex systems, and manages more data.
Because of this, your company faces the challenge of staying current with these evolving changes and adapting to them.
To overcome this challenge, you can create a developer compliance team and appoint a representative to monitor key updates regarding FISMA (representatives with relevant certifications like the CMMC can make your team more effective). Plus, leaders can add top-level alerts and social listening tactics, like tagging keywords in Google Alerts, to notify you of trends when they happen—like when an official announces an upcoming change or when a notable breach in the industry happens.
But if you want to stay ahead of these changes, it's crucial to automate as much as possible so you can have the space to make strategic updates.
Wiz helps you stay ahead by assessing your security and providing reports on your compliance with regulations and standards. The platform uses encryption technologies and services that meet NIST SP 800-57 and FISMA standards. Additionally, auditors review Wiz’s security and privacy programs annually to ensure compliance with industry standards, including SOC2 Type 2, ISO 27001, 27701, 27017, a7018, and PCI.
2. Growing cybersecurity threats
Malicious parties continue to find vulnerabilities within cybersecurity, especially in the cloud. Cloud technology innovations move so quickly that if your organization doesn't consistently improve its cloud security, bad actors will find vulnerabilities before you do.
For example, Microsoft 365 experienced a breach in 2023 when hacker Storm-0558 accessed government accounts. In 2024, a federal review board asked Microsoft to fix its security posture, blaming Microsoft for the fault.
Wiz’s team discusses the Microsoft 365 breach.
These kinds of data breaches can jeopardize your reputation, risk your organization's future, and introduce regulatory consequences from governing bodies. It doesn't matter how large your organization is—if you aren't putting cloud security first to keep up with evolving threats, you can still become vulnerable.
To improve your security posture, you can adopt practices like the following:
Strengthen your incident response plans to meet FISMA risk management requirements.
Conduct regular penetration tests and vulnerability assessments on all critical systems to stay ahead of emerging threats.
Ensure that your CSPs comply with FedRAMP and NIST SP 800-53 controls.
Your organization can also adopt a cloud-native solution like Wiz to tackle these unique threats. With Wiz, you can get the latest FISMA-compliant technology to more effectively secure changing threads across the cloud security landscape.
3. Auditing and reporting
FISMA-compliant organizations need to conduct multiple audits each year to meet regulatory requirements. However, gathering and managing artifacts for compliance can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Additionally, accurate and up-to-date reporting for compliance posture requires collaboration and coordination across teams.
A cloud security platform can help you automate these tasks for more accurate reports, saving you time and decreasing human errors. Wiz, for example, comes with built-in compliance frameworks to help you generate reports and investigate vulnerability findings with a click of a button.
4. Tool fragmentation
Complexity requires unified solutions. This idea may sound simple until you consider how complex compliance requirements are and how you plan to tackle them. If you try to meet complexity by juggling a stack of tools that don't talk to each other, compliance will become much more complex—and possibly unreachable.
Instead, your team can use an all-in-one solution that helps your organization enforce FISMA security standards and reporting and evolve with the changing cloud security landscape. The most important step in finding the right platform is picking one that is cloud-native to more effectively address modern attacks and vulnerabilities.
How to achieve and maintain FISMA compliance
Follow these four security best practices to maintain NIST compliance, meet security requirements, and facilitate FISMA standards:
1. Classify data and automatically encrypt assets
Make sure you protect your data by safeguarding who can access it, as well as when, where, and under what conditions. Start by categorizing data based on its sensitivity and the possible impact of any loss or exposure. This process ensures that your security posture will protect vital assets.
One significant way to protect your data and stay compliant is by encrypting your information. You can implement an improved encryption process when you:
Encrypt your sensitive data to prevent unauthorized use in transit and at rest.
Manage encryption keys and use automated solutions to improve key data protection.
2. Stay up-to-date
The regulatory field changes all the time, so it's critical to monitor those shifts. You can get ahead by keeping your organization up-to-date on the latest information regarding FISMA and NIST frameworks.
Regularly review compliance requirement changes to ensure that your policies and technologies align with regulations. Your team can also check the NIST, CISA, and FedRAMP websites for updates.
3. Document the steps you take
Documenting your activities, changes, and strategies helps you stay organized and maintain compliance much more easily. Doing so is also important during a federal government audit.
You can start by maintaining documentation on your security measures for FISMA compliance. You should include security policies, protocols, and essential activities in this documentation in case there's an audit. Doing so proves that you're responsible and are working to adhere to both current and developing standards.
Not only is documentation important for reporting and organizing steps for compliance, but it’s also a best practice for a cleaner, safer cloud posture.
In an interview with Wiz, cybersecurity expert Nicolas Moy shares his insight on documentation after 20 years of experience. "Many organizations build things without documenting them, and as team members change, knowledge transfer rarely happens,” he says. “This leaves corporate environments unguarded and can have detrimental impacts if environments are poorly documented [or] understood and encryption keys are hardcoded in software code."
4. Promote cloud security awareness
Cloud security platforms are a major cornerstone of security improvement—but one of the first lines of defense is the people who interact with the data.
Because of this, it’s important to nurture and build a culture of cloud security awareness throughout your organization using training and education. This way, you can equip your staff with the know-how to detect common threats and follow best practices for protecting sensitive information and security systems.
You can also couple awareness with verification measures in case staff is vulnerable. For example, with a zero-trust security approach to authentications and user verification measures, you can prevent vulnerabilities when someone does fall short.
The benefits of FISMA compliance
FISMA aims to help federal agencies and their contractors adopt a robust, efficient, risk-based approach to information security. This approach reduces the likelihood of security events and improves security incident response procedures.
Many private-sector organizations use voluntary compliance to strengthen their security posture. This lays the foundation for attracting new business in the federal domain.
However, remember that FISMA is only a starting point for a strong security posture. You should also enforce security measures that go beyond NIST baseline controls to address all vulnerabilities, not just those that help you reach compliance.
Solutions to support FISMA compliance
Compliance and security serve different purposes with distinct objectives. Compliance ensures that you meet third-party requirements, often through a box-ticking exercise, while security addresses your organization’s needs. Despite these differences, compliance and security remain closely related practices.
Your security tools should reflect this connection by offering various capabilities to protect your information assets while benchmarking your security posture against compliance frameworks like FISMA.
You can evaluate your security posture with practical tools that help you identify compliance violations across various mandatory controls. These tools support a risk-based approach to security that aligns with FISMA’s underlying principles. Ideally, these tools will also consolidate capabilities into a single centralized solution, which makes managing compliance and security more manageable and reduces blind spots in your cyber defenses.
If you process or access federal data in the cloud, ensure that your tools comply with FedRAMP. This guarantees a solution that meets FISMA requirements or federal contractual obligations, whether you are a federal agency or a public-sector contractor.
Choosing Wiz for top-of-the-line cloud compliance
Compliance may seem stressful, especially in a fast-moving industry—but it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, you can achieve the high-level compliance you need using a cloud security platform like Wiz.
Wiz can help you maintain automated compliance against over 100 industry standards and regulations, including FISMA, PCI, GDPR, HIPAA, and more, which eliminates the manual work and complexity of meeting standards through a multi-cloud environment. You can also include custom frameworks to meet your own high standards. Additionally, you can generate reports and leverage automatic remediation to manage state-of-the-art, compliant infrastructure.
If you want to meet government standards and avoid breaches like the hack on Microsoft, look no further. Wiz can help you secure your cloud with a holistic, unified solution.
Try the demo today to see how you can maintain a safer cloud environment that meets regulatory requirements.
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