Introducing EMBER: A New Approach to Owning Your Federal Future
The first serious federal opportunity often arrives before a company has a cloud platform ready to support it.
The first serious federal opportunity often arrives before a company has a cloud platform ready to support it. The product may be proven, customers may be interested, and the business case may be clear. Yet bringing that product to the federal market can quickly become an infrastructure engineering project that consumes time, capital, and the same people responsible for building the product.
Today, Coalfire is introducing EMBER, our standardized, automated approach to building a customer-owned cloud platform for regulated markets. It brings together the cloud engineering patterns, integrated security controls, deployment automation, and compliance experience we've developed through years of FedRAMP work. The result is a more practical way for organizations to establish a platform they own and can build on, rather than treating each regulated environment as a new engineering project.
There are legitimate reasons this work has been difficult. FedRAMP requirements are demanding, and for years there wasn't a clear, repeatable way to translate them into cloud architecture, security controls, and operating practices. Companies often started with a blank design and spent months integrating capabilities that other regulated environments needed as well.
After years of designing, building, and assessing FedRAMP environments, we've learned that most organizations don't need a completely bespoke foundation. Much of the underlying engineering is repeatable. EMBER turns that experience into technology that companies can deploy consistently, inspect directly, and own. It's the difference between documenting a proven approach and delivering a repeatable way to build it.
From one-off engineering to a platform you own
EMBER builds on decisions Coalfire has confronted across FedRAMP environments: establishing secure access, collecting logs, monitoring workloads, deploying approved changes, and producing evidence that stands up to assessment. We've encoded those proven patterns into a standardized deployment pipeline.
The complete platform combines a management and security foundation with a private application environment. The management side brings together identity, monitoring, vulnerability management, security analytics, administration, and compliance evidence capabilities. The application side uses a standardized environment designed to run compatible containerized workloads. Shared networking, trust, and deployment services connect the two.
The important part isn't the list of tools. It's that the tools, infrastructure, telemetry paths, and operational workflows are engineered to work together. EMBER gives customers a defined, integrated starting point instead of asking their engineering teams to design and validate every connection from scratch.
And because the environment is built in the customer's own cloud accounts, the architecture and engineering configuration remain visible and under their control. Customers receive a platform they can understand, operate, and evolve, not just a place to deploy software.
Why owning the foundation matters
Managed FedRAMP platforms emerged for a reason. They offered organizations another way into a market where designing and operating a regulated environment had become a major undertaking. But consuming a provider's platform is not the same as controlling the infrastructure and decisions on which your federal business depends.
The distinction is especially important when it comes to certification. With EMBER, the customer owns the underlying platform and pursues certification for its own defined offering, with a path to direct FedRAMP Marketplace recognition through the applicable process. Certification remains a separate process, but the engineering foundation supporting it belongs to the customer and since EMBER is compliant and secure by design, the work to get ready for certification has largely been automated.
That control extends beyond certification. Customers have direct visibility into their architecture, engineering configuration, and supporting evidence. They can establish their own development and security standards, determine how the platform evolves, and choose how it is operated. Just as importantly, ownership provides continuity. The architecture, evidence, and investment in their certification journey remain with the organization, reducing the risk that changes in a third-party provider's pricing, roadmap, or ownership could disrupt their federal business. Rather than building their future around another provider's platform decisions, customers have a foundation they control and can continue improving as their business grows.
Compliance evidence built into the engineering
FedRAMP itself is undergoing a significant transformation, and that direction reinforces why we built Ember. OMB's modernization guidance, M-24-15, calls for a much larger FedRAMP Marketplace, greater reuse of commercial cloud capabilities, and a shift toward automated security assessments and continuous monitoring. The FedRAMP 20x program takes that evolution further. Under the Class C Program Certification path, companies no longer need an agency sponsor to pursue certification. They still need to establish a Marketplace listing tied to a qualifying federal use case and complete the certification process, but the removal of the sponsorship requirement creates new opportunities for organizations that want to establish their own federal presence.
That change is particularly meaningful when combined with FedRAMP's growing emphasis on continuous security verification. Instead of relying primarily on periodic assessments and manually assembled evidence, the program is moving toward technical measurements that demonstrate whether security controls are working as intended. For organizations considering their own platform and certification strategy, this creates an opportunity to build those capabilities into the environment from the beginning.
Our compliance experience has shaped more than Ember's architecture. FedRAMP 20x Class C requires at least two automated methods to persistently verify and validate each applicable Key Security Indicator (KSI). We've developed custom collectors and integration workflows around those requirements, gathering and evaluating evidence from supported cloud infrastructure, identity, security, and operational systems. This is an important part of what makes Ember different. We've translated years of engineering and assessment experience into software that can repeatedly test and document the security posture of the environment.
These checks address practical questions that matter to both security teams and assessors. Are infrastructure changes occurring outside approved deployment processes? Are backups meeting recovery objectives? Are container images consistent with approved software artifacts? Rather than simply collecting screenshots and exporting logs, Ember's custom integrations are designed to evaluate the underlying conditions and produce evidence that helps demonstrate how the environment is operating.
Supporting records are traceable to their sources and feed automated evidence and reporting workflows, including publication to the customer's trust center. For configured and supported sources, evidence collection becomes part of the platform's ongoing operations instead of an exercise recreated before each assessment.
This is where the broader FedRAMP modernization effort and Ember's engineering approach come together. As the program creates more accessible pathways to certification and places greater value on continuous verification, Ember gives organizations a practical foundation for pursuing their own certification while maintaining direct control over the infrastructure, security practices, and evidence supporting their federal business.
Start with one application. Build for what follows.
A company doesn't need a portfolio of ten products to benefit from EMBER. Its first federal application is reason enough to avoid rebuilding foundational security infrastructure from scratch. But when demand grows, the value of owning that platform becomes even clearer.
The standard application environment uses EKS because it can support multiple compatible containerized applications on shared platform services. As a customer adds products, it can reuse the security, identity, monitoring, logging, evidence, and deployment patterns already established. New applications still need onboarding, appropriate security review, and applicable certification change management but they don’t need an entirely new platform or another third-party bill.
That changes the economics of growth. The first application establishes the foundation. When a second, fifth, or tenth product becomes a real opportunity, the customer can build on existing services and invest in what the new workload actually needs. Adding an application still requires integration and applicable certification change review, but it need not trigger another full platform-design exercise. Investment can follow federal demand instead of preceding it all at once.
That repeatability also changes how teams work. Developers can build toward known deployment standards. Security teams can apply consistent controls and validation practices. Operations teams can improve familiar processes rather than learn another custom environment with each product. The value is not just reusable infrastructure. It's reusable engineering knowledge.
There is a longer-term engineering advantage as well. Containerized applications can give teams more repeatable deployment and release practices, which become increasingly useful as the federal portfolio grows. Organizations with different application requirements can still use EMBER's standardized management foundation or engage Coalfire for custom cloud engineering. We will continue to support fully bespoke environments where the requirements call for them.
Built for continuous improvement, not just deployment
EMBER also changes what becomes possible after the initial build. The challenge with one-off architectures is that every improvement can become a separate engineering effort, even when customers need many of the same security or operational changes.
With a standardized platform, monitoring, security controls, operational automation, evidence collection, and platform maintenance can evolve as the underlying design improves.
This is only the beginning
That first supported release is a starting point, not the limit of EMBER's ambition. We're expanding the components, supported application architectures, and deployment patterns, with a longer-term vision that includes other cloud environments and regulated standards such as CMMC. The requirements will differ, but the opportunity remains the same: turn proven engineering and compliance knowledge into reusable technology, and keep improving it. The custom collectors, verification methods, and evidence workflows are part of that extensible foundation, not just features of a single FedRAMP build.
For too long, companies have treated regulated cloud infrastructure primarily as a cost of entering a market. I think that misses what a well-designed, customer-owned platform can become. It can help a business pursue certification for its own offering, establish repeatable engineering standards, introduce new products as demand grows, and keep improving the security and operating capabilities beneath them. What begins as a requirement for the first federal application can become an asset for the broader business.
EMBER is our investment in making that approach practical. We've taken engineering work that used to be repeated customer by customer and built a platform designed to make it reusable. For companies entering the federal market, that means a more direct route to owning the infrastructure behind their offering. For Coalfire, it is the beginning of a broader way to engineer regulated environments. And we're just getting started.
Build your federal future with EMBER
If you're preparing to bring an application into the federal market, let's talk about the opportunity in front of you and the platform you want to own. https://coalfire.com/ember
