The world's most widely deployed operating system in the cloud has officially been certified for highly secure and regulated workloads (such as those for US government agencies, prime contractors, service providers, and organizations in healthcare and finance).

According to Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos, Canonical's product manager for security, "With the new FIPS 140-2 validation, we can continue to deliver the security requirements that our government, finance, and healthcare clients trust to implement the most secure open-source software to power their infrastructure."

FIPS 140 is a U.S. and Canadian data-protection standard that defines security requirements for the design and implementation of cryptographic modules. This new standard ensures that only secure cryptographic algorithms are used for data protection and that all algorithms are thoroughly tested by a third party.

The FIPS 140-2 requirements state that any hardware or software cryptographic module implements algorithms from an approved list. The FIPS validated algorithms cover symmetric and asymmetric encryption techniques as well as the use of hash standards and message authentication. For that, Canonical has made available special releases of Ubuntu (Ubuntu Pro and Ubuntu advantage) that include the new FIPS140 validated module. With these new releases, you can run regulated workloads, reduce compliance costs, and get NIST-certified compliance.

To find out more about getting Ubuntu with the FIPS140 validated module, contact Canonical via this form.