Knox Systems vs UnderDefense

About Knox Systems

Knox Systems sells pre-authorized infrastructure on which SaaS vendors can inherit 60% to 80% of required controls. Knox Systems describes FedRAMP as the federal government's standardized security certification program for cloud products and services. Any cloud software that processes, stores, or transmits federal data must be FedRAMP authorized before an agency can purchase it, according to Knox Systems.^{[1][2][4][12]}

Knox Systems states that the traditional authorization path takes 12 to 36 months, requires an agency sponsor to begin, and demands significant investment in dedicated infrastructure, staffing, and documentation. Customers of Knox Systems do not need to find their own sponsor. Customers inherit Knox's 15+ existing ATOs across federal and DoD agencies including DHS, FEMA, Marines, Treasury, VA, and others.^[4][5]

Knox Systems states that its cloud is deployed on AWS, Azure, and GCP at FedRAMP Moderate, High, and DISA IL4, with 15 ATOs. After the scan, Knox Systems moves to evaluation of high and medium findings and a commercial agreement. Once the agreement is signed, the 90-day clock begins alongside remediation for low findings.^[5]

Knox Systems requires customers to be deployed on one of the three major hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, or GCP, with as close to 100% infrastructure as code coverage as possible. Knox Systems requires CI/CD pipelines for deployments. Customers must ensure any third-party sub-processors that handle CUI data are FedRAMP authorized at the same impact level, or be prepared to find FedRAMP alternatives or self-host those components. Customers of Knox Systems can continue using existing CI/CD pipelines like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD. Knox Systems requires that any runners executing deployments be self-hosted inside the Knox boundary rather than cloud-hosted runners.^[5]

KnoxAI is Knox's proprietary monitoring and remediation software, trained on 10 years of Federal audit data. KnoxAI automates control mapping, vulnerability detection and real-time remediation. Knox Systems provides a dedicated, isolated sub-account for each customer, protected by KnoxAI and with no shared tenant data.^[5][6][7]

Knox Systems describes FedRAMP 20x as replacing periodic assessments and static documentation with a continuous operating model. Knox AI evaluates every vulnerability against FedRAMP 20x requirements and prioritizes findings by risk. Knox AI ingests security telemetry across cloud environments in real time and evaluates every vulnerability against FedRAMP requirements as it is found. Knox AI scores and prioritizes vulnerabilities by operational risk. Knox AI produces both human-readable and machine-readable evidence automatically. Knox AI tracks and documents risk acceptance decisions with audit traceability. Customers connect their cloud environment to begin continuous ingestion of security telemetry across their infrastructure.^[8][11]

Knox Systems describes itself as a team of FedRAMP and Mission Critical SaaS Security experts with 10+ consecutive years of running FedRAMP Clouds. Knox Systems states that it has over 10 years of experience running enterprise applications including Adobe, Celonis, and BigID. Adobe and Knox have partnered since 2014 to deliver secure, compliant cloud environments for government workloads.^{[1][3][5][9][13]}