Cisco announced today it had begun the process of certifying its SD-WAN offerings under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

The networking giant needs FedRAMP authorization before it can begin deploying its SD-WAN offerings into government agencies. And without that authorization, Cisco stands to leave a lot of money on the table. Last month, CenturyLink scored a $1.6 billion contract to supply IT services, including SD-WAN, to the U.S. Interior Department.

Nick Michaelides, Cisco's SVP of U.S. public sector, said the company has a lot of experience with jumping through government hoops. It has already secured FedRAMP authorizations for its Webex hosted collaboration solution for both government and defense applications, Cisco Cloudlock, and Cisco Duo.

"We've been doing hardware certifications for the federal government for decades, and now as our customers start to shift to cloud, FedRAMP is the way they authorize that access to a cloud," he said.

Michaelides said that it doesn't matter whether the agency is under the Department of Defense (DoD) umbrella, a civilian agency, or higher educational institution, SD-WAN offers numerous advantages in terms of user experience and the ability to leverage multiple clouds in a secure manner.

One major advantage is bandwidth. SD-WAN will offer agencies an alternative to bandwidth-constrained MPLS connections by allowing them to shift traffic to low-cost broadband. And this, according to Michaelides will prove far more important as agencies like the Pentagon begin to migrate to the cloud.

Cisco's move to get its SD-WAN services FedRAMP authorized is part of a larger initiative to get bundles of commonly purchased software certified under the government program. "They don't want to buy point products anymore. They want to buy architectures, they want to buy solutions," Michaelides said.

While Cisco is in the process of obtaining FedRAMP authorization for its SD-WAN offerings, the process won't happen overnight.

Michaelides said that while the hope is to gain FedRAMP authorization in less than six months, the process typically runs between six and 12 months and can take as long as 16 months depending on the complexity of the product.

Cisco joins a growing number of vendors and cloud providers building out its portfolio of FedRAMP authorized services as government agencies begin to extend lucrative IT modernization contracts.

Last month, Amazon — which is still embroiled in a lawsuit contesting the Pentagon's decision to award the coveted $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to Microsoft — announced FedRAMP authorizations across a spate of services.

Compliance with federal regulations like FedRAMP is a key in both vendors and service provider's bids for these highly-competitive contracts. Google ultimately pulled its bid for the JEDI contract in part because it was unable to comply with some of the government certifications required by the contract.