What Is an ATO for the Layman?

An ATO for a commercial company is the approval for them to deploy their software into a government environment. There's nuance on what level, what network got it. From the government side, it is an approval authority. So it's credit and officialism saying, yeah, hey, the configuration of this application is below an acceptable risk threshold. It's safe to use this. Again, grossly oversimplified. And then maybe a little commentary on why do you think it's gotten so disconnected? Like this to me seems like a fundamental thing we should be doing, but we're just not converging.