Industry Insights
How to Accelerate the ATO Process Without Cutting Corners
February 10, 2026
|
Optimal Team
|
8 min read
For any organization building software for the federal government, the Authority to Operate (ATO) is the gate that stands between development and deployment. It is the formal declaration by an authorizing official that a system meets an acceptable level of risk. And for too many teams, it represents months -- sometimes well over a year -- of documentation, remediation, and waiting. The average ATO timeline across DoD and civilian agencies still hovers between 12 and 18 months, a timeline that is fundamentally incompatible with modern software delivery.
But here is the thing: the ATO process does not have to be that slow. The controls themselves are not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is how teams approach them. Organizations that treat compliance as an afterthought -- something bolted on at the end of a development cycle -- will always find themselves stuck in remediation loops and evidence-gathering fire drills. Organizations that embed compliance into their engineering workflow from the start can compress that timeline to weeks, not months.
This post lays out a practical playbook for accelerating your ATO without sacrificing the rigor that authorizing officials expect.
Before we talk about solutions, it helps to understand where the time actually goes. In our experience working with defense and federal teams, the delays cluster around a few recurring bottlenecks.
Incomplete or inconsistent documentation. The System Security Plan (SSP) is the backbone of any ATO package, and it must accurately describe the system architecture, data flows, control implementations, and risk posture. When teams write the SSP after the system is already built, gaps are inevitable. Controls that were implemented one way in practice get described differently on paper. Diagrams are outdated. Shared responsibilities between the application team and the cloud provider are poorly delineated. Assessors catch these inconsistencies, and the back-and-forth begins.
Manual evidence collection. For each control, the assessment team needs evidence that it is implemented and operating effectively. Screenshots, configuration exports, scan results, policy documents -- the list is extensive. When this evidence is gathered manually, it becomes a massive time sink. Worse, manual evidence is often stale by the time it reaches the assessor.
Late-stage vulnerability discovery. Teams that defer security testing until the assessment phase routinely discover critical vulnerabilities in their infrastructure and application code at the worst possible time. Every finding that exceeds the risk threshold triggers a remediation cycle, a rescan, and a re-review. This is the single most common cause of ATO delays.
Unclear control inheritance. Most cloud-hosted systems inherit a significant number of controls from the underlying infrastructure provider. FedRAMP-authorized cloud environments, for example, can provide inheritance for dozens of NIST 800-53 controls. But when teams do not clearly document which controls are inherited, which are shared, and which are fully their responsibility, they end up duplicating work or leaving gaps that assessors flag.
Organizational bottlenecks. ATO is not purely a technical process. It requires coordination between engineering, security, compliance, and leadership. When the authorizing official's office has a queue of packages to review, or when the assessment team is stretched thin, calendar delays compound technical ones.
The fastest path to passing a security assessment is to start from a known-good state. That means building on hardened baselines from day one rather than trying to lock down a permissive environment after the fact.
For infrastructure, this means applying Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) to your operating systems, databases, and middleware before you write a single line of application code. For containerized workloads, it means starting from hardened base images -- such as Iron Bank images from Platform One -- that have already been scanned and approved for DoD use.
Starting hardened eliminates entire categories of findings before the assessment even begins. It also makes your Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) dramatically shorter, which is something authorizing officials notice.
Every control implementation needs evidence, and that evidence needs to be current. The teams that move fastest through ATO are the ones that generate evidence as a byproduct of their normal operations rather than as a separate compliance exercise.
What does this look like in practice?
The goal is to make evidence collection a git log or an API call, not a week-long data-gathering exercise. Automation does not just save time; it produces higher-quality evidence because it reflects the actual state of the system rather than a point-in-time snapshot that someone remembered to capture.
If your system is hosted on a FedRAMP-authorized cloud environment, you are sitting on a significant compliance advantage -- but only if you use it correctly. A typical FedRAMP High cloud authorization covers over 100 controls that your system can fully or partially inherit.
The key is to build a clear control responsibility matrix early in the project. For each of the NIST 800-53 controls in your baseline, document whether the control is:
This matrix should reference the cloud provider's Customer Responsibility Matrix (CRM) and map directly to your SSP control descriptions. When done properly, it dramatically reduces the number of controls your team must implement from scratch and provides assessors with clear traceability.
The shift-left principle is well established in the DevSecOps community, but its impact on ATO timelines is often underappreciated. When security testing is embedded in your CI/CD pipeline, vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed as part of normal development -- not during a high-pressure assessment window.
A robust pipeline for ATO-bound systems should include:
When every merge request passes through this gauntlet, the system that reaches assessment is already clean. You are not remediating dozens of findings under time pressure. You are presenting an assessor with a system that has been continuously tested and a pipeline that proves it.
An ATO is not a finish line; it is the starting point of an ongoing authorization. Authorizing officials increasingly expect continuous monitoring programs that provide real-time visibility into the security posture of authorized systems. This shift, codified in NIST SP 800-137 and reinforced by recent DoD directives on continuous ATO (cATO), means that the same automation you build to accelerate initial authorization also serves you in sustainment.
Your continuous monitoring program should produce regular deliverables:
Teams that invest in continuous monitoring find their reauthorization cycles dramatically shortened. They also build trust with authorizing officials, which can translate to faster initial reviews for future systems.
Each of the strategies above has a common thread: automation. The gap between a 14-month ATO and a 14-week ATO is not about skipping steps. It is about eliminating the manual overhead that inflates each step.
Modern compliance platforms can automatically map your deployed infrastructure to control requirements, generate SSP sections from live system data, run continuous STIG checks, aggregate vulnerability data across multiple scanners, and produce assessment-ready evidence packages on demand. When your compliance posture is a live dashboard rather than a static document, the entire assessment process accelerates.
The organizations that move fastest through ATO are not the ones that take shortcuts -- they are the ones that automate the rigor. Every manual process is a delay waiting to happen. Every automated check is a finding you caught before the assessor did.
The tooling landscape has matured significantly. Platforms like Optimal integrate directly with your CI/CD pipeline, cloud infrastructure, and vulnerability scanners to provide a unified compliance view. Instead of assembling evidence from a dozen different sources into a spreadsheet, teams get a single pane of glass that tracks control implementation status, maps evidence to requirements, and generates artifacts in the formats assessors expect.
If your team is facing an upcoming ATO milestone or struggling with a process that has stalled, the most impactful thing you can do today is audit your current workflow against these five strategies. Ask yourself:
Each "no" represents an opportunity to compress your timeline. And the good news is that none of these strategies require you to cut corners on compliance. They are about doing the same work more efficiently, catching issues earlier, and removing the manual friction that turns a structured process into an endless slog.
The ATO process exists for a reason: to ensure that federal systems meet a genuine standard of security. Accelerating it does not mean lowering that standard. It means building the engineering discipline to meet it from the start.
Want to see how Optimal helps teams compress their ATO timelines? Request a demo and we will walk you through how our platform automates STIG compliance, evidence collection, and continuous monitoring for DoD and federal teams.
Executive orders mandate SBOMs, but generating them is only half the battle. Here's how to operationalize your software bill of materials for real security outcomes.
Read blog >>
As DoD adoption of AI accelerates, so do adversarial threats. We break down the top attack vectors targeting military AI systems and how to defend against them.
Read blog >>
Runtime threat detection, enhanced SBOM dependency graphs, STIG automation improvements, and more. A look at everything shipping in Optimal this quarter.
Read blog >>See how Optimal can accelerate your path to ATO while strengthening your security posture.