Monitor Highly Regulated Workloads With Datadog's FIPS-Enabled Agent | Datadog

Monitor highly regulated workloads with Datadog's FIPS-enabled Agent

Author Geoffrey Carlisle

Published: December 11, 2023

Protecting sensitive data from the threat of exposure is a non-negotiable business imperative for organizations, especially those in highly regulated sectors like government and healthcare. To help organizations keep their data secure, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) developed a set of requirements for the hardware and software components responsible for data encryption. Known as the Federal Information Protection Standard (FIPS), these rules ensure that organizations are using compliant cryptographic algorithms, key management, and authentication controls for storing and processing sensitive data.

Automatically encrypt Datadog Agent payloads based on FIPS standards

FIPS compliance is a critical piece of building environments that are certified by Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) standards. We recently announced our commitment to pursuing FedRAMP High authorization, and are excited to continue that commitment with the release of our FIPS-enabled Agent. Leveraging a proxy that uses the FIPS 140-2 validated Cryptographic Module, the FIPS-enabled Agent automatically encrypts payloads using compliant cyphers before forwarding them to Datadog. This enhanced capability for the Datadog Agent is FedRAMP Moderate-certified, ensuring that you are securely monitoring your cloud infrastructure according to FIPS standards.

As with the Datadog Agent, you can view detailed logs about traffic that passes through the sidecar proxy. This ensures that you have continued visibility into Agent activity and can confirm that it is encrypting data as expected.

A log for the FIPS-enabled Agent

Check out our documentation to learn how to configure the FIPS-enabled Agent for your hosts.

Ensure FedRAMP Moderate-certified environments with the FIPS-enabled Agent

With our latest FedRAMP Moderate authorization and FIPS-enabled Agent, we are committed to helping you maintain environments that are compliant to NIST and FedRAMP standards. The FIPS-enabled Agent is now available in the US1-FED region. Check out our documentation for more information about FIPS compliance. If you don’t already have a Datadog account, you can sign up for a .