Introducing OSCAL Hub: The Industry Standard for Easier Authorization

Authorization delays shouldn’t cost millions — and now they don’t have to.

Both commercial and federal organizations have long faced manual documentation processes that consume thousands of hours and review cycles that stretch across months. Although NIST introduced its Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) to solve exactly this problem, teams have lacked a comprehensive platform to actually put automated compliance into practice. 

Enter OSCAL Hub: the industry’s first comprehensive, open-source platform purpose-built for working with OSCAL documents. Whether you’re an Authorizing Official reviewing security packages, a federal agency preparing for ATO, or a contractor responding to compliance requirements, OSCAL Hub transforms how security authorization actually happens.

Donated to the OSCAL Foundation by RegScale, OSCAL Hub leverages NIST’s Open Security Controls Assessment Language to fundamentally change the game. It turns weeks of review cycles into days, eliminates gaps and inconsistencies with automated validation, and accelerates the path to authorization. 

Let’s walk through what makes it different. 

The AO Easy Button: Built for How Authorization Actually Works 

Authorizing Officials in the Federal government face many time sinks in the course of their work: security packages that arrive as massive Word documents, inconsistent formatting across sections, and manual validation that turns every review into an archaeological dig for compliance gaps. The current approach is a barrier to the confident authorization decisions that federal missions depend on. 

OSCAL Hub changes this dynamic by delivering pre-validated, machine-readable packages that are ready for review from the moment they arrive. Instead of hunting through prose for control implementations, AOs get interactive visualizations that instantly surface risks and compliance status. NIST 800-53 validation happens automatically, so the focus shifts from “Is this formatted correctly?” to “Does this meet our security requirements?” 

What does this look like in practice? One ISSO at a federal agency put it simply: the tool reduced ATO documentation time from six weeks to three days, with automated validation catching errors that would have been missed manually.  

How Does OSCAL Hub Work? 

As a comprehensive, open-source platform, the OSCAL Hub brings together many core capabilities that compliance teams need in their daily work.  

• A validation engine ensures documents comply with schema constraints and validation rules automatically. (No more guessing whether a package will pass muster or not.)
• Format conversion handles the transitions between XML, JSON, and YAML with side-by-side preview, so teams can work in whatever format their tools require.
• Visualization features turn complex OSCAL documents into interactive data that humans can actually explore and understand.
• A community library lets organizations browse, share, and download example OSCAL documents. (Stop reinventing compliance artifacts that others have already perfected.)
• Customizable templates offer faster creation and management of system authorization documents.
• For development teams, the REST API enables seamless integration and allows for validation in the CI/CD pipeline rather than in separate manual processes.   

The efficiency gains of OSCAL Hub are measurable: what used to require over 1,000 hours of manual SSP writing in Word now takes 2 hours using validated templates. That’s the sizable difference between compliance as a bottleneck and compliance as an enabler. 

Why OSCAL Is the Key to Easier Authorization 

Instead of treating compliance as a documentation exercise — PDFs and Word files that humans read but machines can’t process — NIST OSCAL treats it as structured data.  When compliance data is machine-readable, automation and continuous monitoring can take over. 

The standardized format also improves consistency across frameworks and organizations. With OSCAL, a FedRAMP package looks like a FedRAMP package, whether it came from Agency A or Contractor B. Teams can reuse compliance artifacts rather than starting from scratch every time, and continuous compliance can reflect changes in real-time instead of stale point-in-time snapshots. 

Most importantly, OSCAL enables faster and more reliable compliance processes. It’s the gold standard for compliance as code and for faster ATOs.   

In an era where federal modernization initiatives demand efficiency, this kind of speed and standardization matters more than ever. Modern missions can’t afford to wait months for an authorization decision to be held up by formatting errors — and they shouldn’t have to. 

Built by the Community, For the Community 

Developed by RegScale and donated to the OSCAL Foundation, the hub offers automated compliance workflows for the FedRAMP PMO, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, federal Authorizing Officials, and industry practitioners. It was built for and by people who’ve been working directly with the standard since its inception — practitioners who understand both the technical requirements and the real-world compliance challenges that organizations face daily.  

OSCAL Hub can be deployed anywhere, reflecting how different teams actually work:  

• CLI mode provides a standalone command-line tool for automation, scripting, and CI/CD pipelines with no database or web interface required.
• Local deployment gets the full platform running on a local machine or VM in minutes, ideal for testing, development, and offline use.
• For production environments, Azure and AWS deployment come with robust automation and infrastructure options. 

Because OSCAL Hub is open-source, future improvements benefit everyone. It’s a compliance platform built the way modern software should be built: transparent, collaborative, and focused on solving real problems with real innovation.

The Path Forward: From Millions Lost to Mission Acceleration 

Authorization delays carry real costs. Agencies lose millions annually to inefficiencies that stem from manual processes, formatting errors, and review cycles that stretch across months. This translates to mission capabilities delayed, security improvements postponed, and teams stuck in compliance limbo when they should be delivering value. 

OSCAL Hub addresses these inefficiencies with the kind of modern automation that federal missions require. When review cycles drop from six weeks to three days, it means faster deployment of secure systems, quicker responses to emerging threats, and authorization decisions made with confidence rather than uncertainty.  

This is the future we envision, and this is the future we’re building for the federal government — and beyond.