Case Studies

The Challenge

Preparing to enter a new vertical with strict security requirements

For the last two years, Knightscope had been preparing to take a huge step for their business, Director of Information Security Christopher Reider tells us. They were getting ready to sell their Autonomous Security Robots (ASRs) to government entities.

Cloud applications for the US government have strict security requirements. To meet them, Knightscope built an entirely new environment in AWS GovCloud. The final and most important step in the process was applying for FedRAMP certification. To do that, they needed a FedRAMP accredited Third-Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) to conduct a thorough review of their infrastructure and help them prepare for their upcoming FedRAMP audit.

“When it comes to something as specific as FedRAMP, you want to work with a partner that has that knowledge and experience to come in and look at your architecture and your documentation to make sure that everything is going to work well.”

The Solution

An experienced assessment partner to help them prepare

As leaders in the autonomous robotics field, the team at Knightscope always want to make sure their partners understand how their technology works and operates in the real world.

Christopher particularly appreciated the effort Cloudnexa put into learning Knightscope’s product and technology, so they could apply their AWS expertise to Knightscope’s unique
use case.

They began looking at the different endpoints and fine-tuning their processes to match the security controls that FedRAMP requires, exploring their existing architecture to identify gaps and vulnerabilities.

Cloudnexa and Knightscope routinely met for several working sessions a day, for 60 days to meet Knightscope’s very tight deadline. Throughout the process, Cloudnexa became an extension of Knightscope’s team.

“The Cloudnexa team came in and really became a part of our team, truthfully. We were sending 30 or 40 emails back and forth every day. I was so impressed with the way that Cloudnexa worked with our team, asked really good questions, and gave us some hard things to think about.”

Results

Achieving their “in-process” FedRAMP rating

With Cloudnexa’s help, Knightscope achieved their U.S. Federal Government FedRAMP “In- Process” rating, joining 83 other companies that are actively working towards their agency authorizations for 2023.

Becoming FedRAMP certified means that Knightscope will be able to do business with government entities. It opens up a whole new vertical for the company, with exponential growth possibilities. Knightscope is also the only autonomous security robotics company to have taken this step, which gives them a valuable advantage over their competition.

Today, Knightscope is closer to the completion of their authorization process—a massive success for the company, according to Christopher.

“Having the partnership with Cloudnexa made us more prepared and more successful. I feel that the work Cloudnexa did for us put Knightscope on a completely different level.”

About Cloudnexa and AWS

Cloudnexa represents limitless potential with the power to transform small businesses into industry leaders and scale global organizations into agile innovators. At Cloudnexa, we help you harness that potential and leverage it to achieve any goal you can imagine. We engineer solutions for success on your terms.

Next steps

To learn more about how AWS and Cloudnexa can help your business, visit www.cloudnexa.com