Dell Inc. has had its government cloud officially certified to show it meets federal cloud security standards, which should make it a lot easier for the company to start winning business from federal agencies.

Dell joins a fairly short list of certification cloud providers that can now sell their wares to U.S. agencies without any need for said agencies to examine its cloud security capabilities individually.

The FedRAMP certification has recently come under fire for being cumbersome, expensive and inefficient. However, these problems have been acknowledged by the General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees it FedRAMP, and just last month it introduced a new process that promised faster speed to certification, more transparency and lower costs for those wishing to get certified.

“We want to make sure that if we say someone is ready, that there’s actual power behind that,” said FedRAMP director Matt Goodrich at a launch event last month, reported by MeriTalk.

Dell’s infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud for government agencies is one of 27 services provided by 22 vendors, which include IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Oracle and VMware Inc. Each of the 27 services has been certified as “FedRAMP compliant”, which means they meet both the security standards designated by third parties, and have been authorized as good to go by the GSA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

Vendors also need to secure a second compliance certification, but they can get hold of this by working with specific customer agencies. Many more companies have already achieved this kind of certification, including Amazon Web Services, Box Inc., Cisco Systems Ltd., Google, Salesforce.com, Inc. and many others.

Once Dell’s merger with EMC Corp. goes through later this year, it will get its hands on additional FedRAMP certifications that have been attained by VMware and Virtustream. The latter recently teamed up with QTS Realty Trust Inc., a provider of data center services, to host federal cloud infrastructure at its facilities in Dallas and Dulles, Virginia. There, they will provide both compliance and cloud hosting services to government agencies.

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