Aligning Government IT to NIST, FedRAMP, and GovRAMP: A Compliance Primer

The core frameworks

• NIST 800-53 / 800-171 - control catalogs for federal information systems and for protecting controlled unclassified information in non-federal systems.
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 - a widely adopted, outcome-based way to organize a security program.
• FedRAMP - the federal program standardizing security assessment and authorization for cloud services.
• GovRAMP (formerly StateRAMP) - a comparable program focused on state and local government.

Sector-specific rules

Government also layers in CJIS (criminal justice data), Section 508 / WCAG 2.2 AA (accessibility), and, by vertical, FERPA/CIPA/COPPA (education), HIPAA/HITECH (healthcare), and others.

What alignment means

Aligning to a framework means engineering your systems and processes to its controls and expectations - access control, encryption, logging and monitoring, incident response, and documentation. Alignment is not the same as a formal certification or authorization, which is a separate, audited process. Being clear about that distinction matters, especially for a government vendor.

How ALINEDS approaches it

ALINEDS treats compliance as an engineering input from the start, aligning its IT, cybersecurity, and AI work to the frameworks each agency answers to - including the NIST AI RMF for AI governance - so agencies can modernize and adopt AI while meeting their obligations.