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Why FedRAMP®-level vulnerability management creates stronger security for every LabArchives customer — not just government agencies.
Author: Steve Maybo, Senior Director of Cloud & Information Technologies at LabArchives
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In the commercial SaaS world, vulnerability management is a bit like flossing. Everyone knows they should do it regularly — and probably more. Most people do it occasionally, and a surprising number do it intensely for two days before their dentist appointment and then not again for six months. Nobody is watching. Nobody is grading you. And if something bad happens as a result, well — “I'll do better from now on, I promise.”
ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are supportive frameworks in this regard. They essentially say: "You should have a vulnerability management program. What it looks like — you decide." They trust you. They believe in you. They audit you once a year and assume you've been keeping up with your hygiene in between.
FedRAMP takes those basic efforts to the extreme with strict, specific and vast requirements — and lots of oversight and quick judgment. FedRAMP does not trust you. FedRAMP does not believe in you. It's not personal — they just know how you can be sometimes.
Let's be specific about what FedRAMP demands, because the details are where the stolen movie line ends and the real work starts. LabArchives' FedRAMP authorization means adhering to a very exhaustive list of scan standards for the government.
Code Scanning — with every commit. Cloud applications involve a ton of code — millions of lines your development teams wrote when they were at their best at 12PM and somewhat less so at 12AM. Add to that the embedded third-party libraries, packages, and components that exist behind every URL on the planet. Code and libraries are the vital organs of any web application that should be watched closely.
OS and Infrastructure Protections — Monthly or More. FedRAMP doesn't want an outside look at your systems. It wants to be let inside. These reach into operating systems and infrastructure components, looking for many things — every misconfiguration, every unpatched library, every dusty corner of your environment that hasn't been looked at since the last person who understood it left the company. Add to that weekly FedRAMP OS patching and hardening to secure things even more.
Container Image Scanning. FedRAMP says monthly, but we like weekly at LabArchives. Consider that container that had all-new parts just months ago that is already woefully out of date. FedRAMP checks. FedRAMP finds. FedRAMP squeals.
Database Scanning. You know — where all the valuable data lives and where any sort of scanning is often not even considered? FedRAMP-grade vulnerability management gets all up in your business there too.
Web Application Scanning. Every internet-facing application gets scanned including logging into the system. Regularly. Not "when we get around to it" regularly. At a minimum…monthly. At LabArchives…weekly.
If you're not a government customer, you might think LabArchives’ FedRAMP standards don’t matter to you. And you’d be wrong. The great news for all LabArchives customers is that many of these rigorous efforts done for FedRAMP requirements benefit our commercial environments as well, because both environments share a lot of the same code, systems, configs, technologies, people, and 12AM ideas.
FedRAMP standards will look, and find it. All of it. Everywhere.
Annual penetration testing under FedRAMP is not a casual affair. It is performed by qualified, independent testers following specific NIST guidelines. You cannot test yourself. You cannot have your cousin who "knows computers" do it.
You hire professionals whose entire job is to find every way into and within your environment that you haven't thought of. They'll log in, poke around, create users, create data, try things the development and QA teams never imagined, and see if they can grab any valuables on the way out. They don’t take off in the getaway car never to be seen again with your goodies. These folks stick around, relishing the opportunity to point fingers and snicker to validate their services. They will take off, but they first hand you a humbling report full of your deficiencies that are logged forever with timelines for fixes that are coming up quick. Don't worry, with FedRAMP oversight, someone will be back to check on your progress soon enough.
Commercial-grade penetration testing, by contrast, is often treated as a one-time credentialing exercise. Sometimes it's done with an automated tool, which limits findings — and fewer findings means less work, so that's good, right? Oftentimes, cloud providers get the report, fix the critical items, set the mediums and lows aside for later because "they aren't critical," file the report away, and consider the matter closed. Sure, we do pentests.
FedRAMP finds more and the results are fully documented to resolution — even if it turns out to be a false positive. How’s your cloud service provider’s pentesting process? Is it done by a good thief or is it just good enough?
Most SaaS products operate on a security strategy best described as “reasonable effort” — and reasonable effort leaves room for risk. FedRAMP has no interest in reasonable effort. It demands rigor, imposing strict remediation timelines that don't bend for quarterly roadmap commitments, delayed features, or competing priorities — security always comes first. Always.
Can’t make a FedRAMP finding deadline and you're filing formal documentation and presenting it to your government customer in a required monthly audit review. Even a low-risk finding that less stringent security standards might comfortably defer for months becomes an unacceptable moment that FedRAMP simply doesn't allow.
For LabArchives customers — whether they operate in a government environment or not — that standard means that no customers have to settle for a cloud provider's ”reasonable effort.”
FFor LabArchives, achieving FedRAMP authorization meant building a vulnerability management and remediation program that operates at a very high standard, continuously. Extending many of those same standards to its commercial and academic environments is a win for everyone. The result is a product where every customer, government or not, benefits from a level of vulnerability rigor that most SaaS vendors simply don't do. Those benefits include:
In total, it creates an organization-wide security culture where finding every possible vulnerability is celebrated, not avoided — and where the security posture of the product genuinely improves month over month, because the alternative (explaining yourself to a federal agency) is a sufficiently motivating consequence.
Like everywhere else in life, it turns out that when something like FedRAMP sets the standard to follow, actually watches you closely and waits for you to slip up, you do a better job 100% of the time.
In a world where cloud data vulnerabilities are rising in number, cost, and impact, finding more of your faults isn't just smart — it's the best option. When you compare cloud laboratory data solutions, do you consider the provider’s vulnerability management program that protects your valuable data? Do they go to extremes? LabArchives does.
Does your commercial laboratory data solution also adhere to higher FedRAMP standards for government customers? LabArchives does. FedRAMP doesn’t accept “we meant to fix that next quarter.” Neither do we. Inside the LabArchives Trust Center, you can explore the security controls, certifications, scanning practices, and governance standards that help drive our continuous security program. Visit the LabArchives Trust Center
And if you’re evaluating laboratory data platforms, ask your provider how far they take vulnerability management. Then ask us the same question.
In the next GsP Shorts: Rigorous scan and test processes that find problems are all fine and good, but when do you think you’ll be fixing them? The clock is ticking. Fast. Stay tuned for a future article on how LabArchives’ FedRAMP-grade remediation timelines set a higher standard than most — for government, commercial, and academic customers alike.
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