Center for Organizational Excellence

Company: Center for Organizational Excellence
Industry: Federal
Carpathia Services: Secure Managed Hosting, Federal Security Standards Compliance

Why Carpathia?

• Carpathia understood the Certification and Accreditation process inside and out and was experienced in helping agencies achieve the necessary milestones.
• Carpathia had the expertise to meet complex federal IT security regulations such as FISMA.

Background
For a quarter century, the Center for Organizational Excellence, Inc. (COE) has focused on helping federal government and commercial clients measurably improve organizational performance through a broad range of management consulting and product solutions. As a forward-thinking organization, COE recognized the importance of having in its portfolio a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that delivers its world-class software in a turnkey, hosted and fully-managed fashion, thus helping clients speed implementation time and reduce upfront costs.

Challenge
COE recognized the need to outsource the hosting platform to a company with experience in delivering SaaS solutions to the federal market vs. in-house development that requires a significant capital investment, long lead-times and specialized facilities, processes and expertise to meet complex federal IT security regulations. To kick off its SaaS hosting initiative, COE developed a comprehensive set of requirements to meet its federal agency clients' needs, as well as federal IT regulations -- robust physical and logical security, the flexibility to quickly ramp individual solutions up or down, and excellent disaster recovery and backup solutions. And, because COE and its first federal SaaS client had not been through the Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process, COE needed a hosting partner that understood the process inside and out, and was experienced in helping agencies achieve the necessary milestones.

Approach
COE quickly discovered that Carpathia Hosting was the provider for the job. The Carpathia team led COE and its first federal agency client through the complex C&A process, showcasing their expertise and experience in the area. The hosting provider’s work remained completely integrated with that of COE and its client, ensuring that expectations were set and met for all involved parties. COE looked at every conceivable aspect of Carpathia's operation - from the obvious components such as physical security (windows, doors, cameras, alarms) - to the critical details including processes and policies for hiring, clearing and transitioning their technical staff. The detailed, point-by-point review actually had to be done twice: a thorough initial investigation by COE, and a second, equally deep investigation by COE's federal agency client.

Solution
COE's selection of Carpathia to host its client resulted in a successful implementation of the organization's SaaS offerings. With Carpathia's diligent support, COE achieved its SaaS implementation, on-time and on-budget and met all requirements.