From Six Months to Two Days: Accelerating ATO for Navy and Beyond

"Do you have an ATO?"

This is one of the first, and most crucial, questions a software company faces when meeting with the War Department. And the answer they provide often determines if a program moves forward with the government or stalls.

For years, the Authorization to Operate (ATO) process in the War Department has been measured in months, not weeks. Twelve months or more for a single approval is the norm. These delays leave warfighters without critical capabilities… and programs carrying unnecessary risk.

Across the defense industrial base and other regulated sectors like aerospace, energy, and critical infrastructure, the problem looks different but feels the same: compliance reviews and security sign-offs that grind delivery to a halt, keeping features and fixes out of production while risks compound.

Whether in the cloud, afloat, or ashore, the bottleneck has been clear: the ATO process itself. But Defense Unicorns' Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS) radically accelerates authorization by automating the evidence, security, and consistency that Authorizing Officials (AOs) depend on.

Breaking the Bottleneck with UDS

Instead of treating security as a checkpoint at the end of the pipeline, UDS bakes compliance into every stage of development and delivery, accelerating the path to an ATO.

Automated evidence creation: CI/CD pipelines generate the body of evidence AOs need to grant or update an ATO quickly.

Integrated security scanning: Vulnerability scans, SBOMs, and container signing happen automatically, not as a last-minute scramble before an ATO package is submitted.

Immutable, declarative baselines: UDS and software packages are declaratively provisioned as immutable objects, so AOs know and trust what is running in their environment.

Airgap-Native: With Zarf, the open-source package manager, even disconnected and classified environments can receive secure updates that preserve ATO integrity.

The result: A process that empowers Information System Security Managers (ISSMs) and AOs to act on real-time data, not months-old paperwork.

Proof in Practice: Two Days vs. Six Months

A NAVSEA team that adopted DevSecOps standards and UDS reduced application upgrade approvals from a historical six-month cycle to under two days, culminating in 13 updates to a production environment over a nine-month period.

The difference wasn't more manpower. It was automation, alignment, and trust:

• UDS Dev/Test environment with declarative CI/CD pipelines implementing the Certificate to Ship (CtS) processes.
• UDS platform services mapped to required NIST SP 800-53 controls.
• COTS, GOTS, and Open-Source Software inherit security controls from UDS, reducing rework and duplication.

This is ATO acceleration in action: secure, compliant, and dramatically faster.

What's at Stake: Losses and Gains

Slow ATOs carry real costs:

War Department: Ballooning budgets. Lost decision advantage in contested environments. Vulnerabilities linger unpatched. Warfighters wait months for tools they need today.

Business: Programs stall. Market opportunities slip. Competitors move faster. Security gaps widen. Expenses rise. Small businesses fail.

Accelerated ATOs with Defense Unicorns deliver clear gains:

Budget: Low cost of compliance with reusable authorized components and automated evidence.

Speed: Approvals in weeks, not years.

Security: Continuous scanning, signed containers, and SBOMs built into every release.

Agility: Deploy to the platform of your choice — from cloud to shipboard edge — without rework.

Confidence: Compliance evidence and immutable software baselines generated automatically, always current, always ready.

UDS Powers RPOCs

For the Navy, RPOC (RAISE Platform of Choice) is the designation that ensures the agile delivery of containerized applications across platforms and environments once approved. It is, at heart, the continuous ATO (cATO) implementation strategy for the Department. In conversations across the fleet, we're hearing the same question again and again: "Is your solution an RPOC?"

The answer is yes. Defense Unicorns' UDS platform and open-source innovations like Zarf and Pepr align directly with the Navy's RAISE 2.0 framework. That means:

• Software and platform portability from cloud to shipboard edge environments.
• Inheritable security controls and evidence that satisfy RPOC requirements.
• Flexibility to run where the mission or your business requires.

For the Navy, that means confidence with their investments aligning to Department priorities. For enterprises, it means a delivery model that scales securely.

How RPOC Extends ATO Acceleration

At its core, RPOC isn't a separate initiative. It's an extension of the same push to accelerate ATO and software delivery. The Navy designed RPOC to ensure that once software is approved, it can move quickly across environments without restarting the authorization process from scratch:

Shared controls: The same vulnerability scans, SBOMs, and container signing that enable faster approvals are the foundation of RPOC compliance.

Portability of trust: With RPOC, authorizations don't just move faster; they move farther, following the application from cloud to shipboard edge.

Reduced duplication: Instead of programs re-running the same security reviews in different enclaves, inheritable controls streamline the path.

For Defense Unicorns, this alignment isn't hypothetical. UDS delivers the automation, open-source tools, and DevSecOps pipelines that make RPOC possible… and in turn, RPOC enables the ATO acceleration programs need.

The Defense Unicorns Difference

Defense Unicorns has already proven acceleration in the field, reducing Navy software approvals from six months to just two days or less. We're not just users of open-source tools. We build them, including Zarf and Pepr, which are now part of our RPOC implementation playbook.

And because our approach works across domains, from enterprises to submarines, customers gain a delivery model that is both faster and more secure, wherever their software runs.

Let's Talk

For defense leaders, this is about getting to an ATO faster and putting software into Sailors' hands sooner. For commercial innovators, it's about adopting practices sharpened by the most demanding customer in the world.

If you're ready to accelerate your ATO from months to weeks, Defense Unicorns is ready to help, supporting warfighters where it matters most.