How Unqork Enables Federal Agencies to Modernize Federal Government Cybersecurity

The Unqork Federal team partnered with VRTL Space to enable Federal CISOs to make informed risk-based decisions with the VRTL Risk Management Framework (RMF) solution powered by Unqork.

During the first annual Unqork Create conference, Unqork’s John O’Grady (Director of Federal) and Casey Johnson (VP – Federal) led a virtual discussion with Noah Hildebrandt, VP – Product Development with VRTL Space. 

VRTL Space (pronounced “virtual space”) is a Native American-owned management and technology consulting firm specializing in the DevSecOps space. The company uses Unqork’s industry-first no-code development platform to power its Ohtalho platform, which streamlines the risk management framework (RMF) lifecycle and empowers organizations to address agency security requirements in an efficient manner. 

“Everybody does this process just a little bit differently,” Noah explained. “Some organizations like to put their own spin on it. Others just really don’t understand the process to begin with. And one of the primary reasons we’re developing Ohtalho is to standardize that process. So using Ohtalho every organization across the federal government is going through a FedRAMP ATO and they’re doing it in the same way, the best possible GSA-defined way. That gives us greater assurance across the government, which is really what RMF is at the end of the day—it’s to assure that risk is being addressed and managed appropriately.”

“That’s one of the reasons that we partnered with Unqork. We can iterate very quickly, so we can rapidly change workflows and processes based on an individual agency’s needs.”

It would be difficult to build a complex solution such as this using a traditional code-based approach, which is why VRTL Space decided to partner with Unqork. For one thing, Unqork’s platform makes it easy to rapidly build custom workflows to address the changing security needs of a specific agency. “That’s one of the reasons that we partnered with Unqork,” Noah explained. “We can iterate very quickly, so we can rapidly change workflows and processes based on an individual agency’s needs.”

Part of the acceleration of building with Unqork is owed to the ease with which developers (or “Creators” as we refer to them at Unqork) can seamlessly integrate custom solutions with legacy systems and third-party services. This allowed VRTL Space to inject enterprise functionality into the system.

“Another reason we chose Unqork is the ability to integrate with industry-standard tools. A good example would be with JIRA. Ohtalho can automatically create JIRA tickets based on specific events and workflows. Let’s say for instance you found a critical or high vulnerability issue, a JIRA ticket will be automatically created via functionality embedded in Unqork. Then it can be assigned to the team’s backlog and they can prioritize it and begin scoping it right away.”

Watch the video above to learn more about Ohtalho and VRTL Space’s ongoing relationship with Unqork.