Ep 208 Innovation with OSCAL, Federal Cloud, and Compliance

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Everyone reading this knows that April 15 is the dreaded day that one must pay federal income taxes. Big business has hordes of tax accountants and lawyers who do tax planning to accommodate federal deadlines.

Sometimes, the deadline could be better known. Are you familiar with the OMB’s M-24-15? This will require companies to submit compliance information in a machine-readable format.

Today, we sat down with Valinder Mangat from DRTConfidence. Valinder describes technology, deadlines, and approaches your company can use to comply.

This interview will serve as a warning about an immense deadline that is crucial if you work with the federal government and cloud service providers.

Essentially, NIST recognized that compliance done manually was time-consuming and subject to error. Back in 2016, they suggested OSCAL to streamline compliance. In addition to speeding things up, OSCAL allows for reuse without repetitive assessments.

Whether you realize it or not, by the end of 2025, each federal contractor will be expected to provide compliance information in the OSCAL format, which stands for Open Security Controls Assessment Language.

The other side of the coin is important to discuss as well. If you are an agency dealing with cloud compliance, you will be expected to be able to ingest compliance data in the OSCAL format.