When working with U.S. federal agencies, compliance isn’t optional—it’s mission-critical. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) sets the gold standard for cloud security across government systems. It demands rigorous controls around system integrity, vulnerability management, configuration baselines, and secure DevOps practices. For any organization supporting federal workloads, achieving FedRAMP authorization is a milestone—but maintaining that compliance is an ongoing challenge, especially in containerized environments.
At the heart of FedRAMP is a commitment to repeatable, risk-based controls that protect sensitive workloads in highly regulated, often mission-critical, environments. Containers offer many security benefits, and can help development teams build and deploy software at a rapid pace.
But even with mature security frameworks, achieving and maintaining FedRAMP compliance in containerized environments remains difficult. Government teams and contractors face several persistent challenges:
Common base images often include hundreds of unnecessary libraries, tools, and packages. These “extra” components serve no purpose in production workloads - but expand the attack surface significantly.
FedRAMP requires teams to define and maintain a secure configuration baseline, but this is nearly impossible to do when the baseline itself is oversized and riddled with vulnerabilities.
FedRAMP requires timely and risk-based remediation, but container scanning tools return hundreds of results, and offer little insight into prioritization, treating all CVEs equally and showing no context as to active risk.
This results in alert fatigue and wasted cycles, delaying the remediation of genuinely critical vulnerabilities and increasing the likelihood of compliance gaps.
FedRAMP emphasizes continuous monitoring and fast response, yet many organizations have manual processes for tracking CVEs, notifying stakeholders, and enforcing policies. Without built-in automation, teams have slower response times and struggle to keep pace with patches and emerging vulnerabilities.
Classified and air-gapped environments are a fact of life in the federal landscape. However, many modern cloud-native security tools assume constant internet access for updates, telemetry, and policy synchronization.
Working around these assumptions often requires significant manual work, losing visibility, or building complicated, bespoke solutions on a per environment basis - all of which significantly complicate reaching and maintaining compliance
Secure and reproducible build pipelines, software bills of materials (SBOMs) and signed artifacts are now table stakes for any regulated environment - especially when it comes to FedRAMP compliance
But with layered container images, often built atop open source components - traceability across the supply chain can be patchy at best—making it difficult to demonstrate image provenance and satisfy FedRAMP’s DevSecOps requirements.
Minimus container images are designed to address these challenges head-on and align directly with FedRAMP objectives. Built from scratch with only essential components, Minimus images reduce vulnerability exposure by 95% or more compared to common base images.
This hardened baseline, combined with integrated threat intelligence for CVE prioritization, support for automated remediation via action providers (e.g., Slack, GitHub Actions, and webhooks), and full compatibility with self-hosted and air-gapped environments, makes Minimus a powerful enabler for FedRAMP-compliant containerized workloads.
Here's 5 ways Minimus helps:
Minimus images include only what’s required for the target workload, eliminating unnecessary libraries and binaries. This minimal design results in a 95%+ reduction in known vulnerabilities (CVEs) compared to official images, simplifying compliance with FedRAMP vulnerability scanning and patch management requirements.
Minimus incorporates real-time threat intelligence into vulnerability metadata, allowing teams to identify and patch high-impact, actively exploited vulnerabilities first—directly supporting FedRAMP requirements for timely and risk-based vulnerability mitigation.
Native support for action providers allows automated alerts, patch workflows, and policy enforcement via commonly used ops tools like Slack, GitHub Actions, and custom webhooks. This enables continuous monitoring and automated response in alignment with FedRAMP continuous monitoring (ConMon) controls.
Minimus supports full operation in disconnected, air-gapped, and classified environments—ensuring agencies and contractors can maintain container security and update processes without relying on external registries or internet access, in compliance with FedRAMP Moderate and High baselines.
Each Minimus image is built using reproducible methods and includes verifiable provenance, digital signatures, and software bills of materials (SBOMs). This ensures full supply chain transparency and supports integrity verification and auditability as required under FedRAMP.
FedRAMP demands more than just scanning—it requires secure-by-default infrastructure, end-to-end visibility, and automated controls. Minimus delivers on all fronts, helping federal contractors and cloud service providers move faster without sacrificing security or compliance.
Whether you’re pursuing your initial Authority to Operate (ATO) or looking to strengthen continuous monitoring practices, Minimus provides a hardened, compliant foundation for containerized workloads. Download the FedRAMP Compliance One-Pager here.
