Salesforce can now provide SaaS and PaaS cloud services to the government

In a move that could have big implications for the budding civic innovation space, Salesforce has become the first outfit to be granted authorization to provide both software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service cloud services to U.S. Federal Government agencies. Back in 2010, the Obama administration announced a “cloud first” policy for improving and cutting the costs of the government’s IT management. Because it’s the government, this meant a healthy serving of alphabet soup as numerous new designations, programs, and committees were created to manage the technical transition.

Salesforce.com announced Friday that it has received the authority to operate (ATO) on its new Government Cloud, both for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). With the ATO, granted under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), federal agencies will have one location for all their cloud products and services. Salesforce got the authorization from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which used the FedRAMP baseline guidelines that help agencies migrate to the cloud securely. Agencies can now use Salesforce’s commercial off-the-shelf applications, as well as the Salesforce1 platform to customize applications with additional functionality or build new applications within the cloud environment. The company describes Salesforce1 as its “next-generation social, mobile, and cloud customer platform,” which offers richer mobile-development and cloud-development options with significantly more APIs and services. There are more than 100 apps from Salesforce partners — such as BasicGov and LaunchPad — available to government customers on the Salesforce1 AppExchange, the company said.