Serving defense and highly regulated government customers means security and compliance aren’t optional; they’re foundational. As GovSignals expanded into high-security federal environments, the company needed to secure its software supply chain without slowing a small engineering team or taking on long-term remediation debt.

The challenge

GovSignals’ core ideology is acceleration over velocity — moving fast today while ensuring they can move even faster tomorrow. As Conner Aldrich, CTO and Co-Founder, explained, open source plays a central role in that strategy, providing proven foundations the team can build on confidently.

Early on, GovSignals deployed primarily in serverless environments. But as the company expanded into FedRAMP High and IL5 deployments for defense and Department of Defense (DoD)-adjacent customers, it moved to self-managed Kubernetes and Docker environments, and the bar for security changed dramatically.

For FedRAMP High, vulnerability remediation at the OS and base-image layers isn’t just a best practice—it’s table stakes. Even a small number of critical or high-severity CVEs can block audits, delay approvals, and stall revenue.

With a lean team of fewer than 10 engineers, GovSignals faced a tradeoff: invest scarce engineering time maintaining container images and remediating CVEs, or find a trusted partner to handle that work continuously and at scale.

“Technically, you can remediate all these vulnerabilities yourself,” Conner explained. “But the time cost is massive, especially for a startup. That time is far better spent building the product our customers actually care about.”

The solution

When GovSignals decided to standardize on Docker and Kubernetes for its high-security environments, the team evaluated the market and chose Chainguard Containers immediately. “We were using Chainguard from day one when we decided to start using containers,” Conner explained.

The decision was driven by trust and experience. Chainguard came highly recommended by partners already operating in federal and defense environments, and the team recognized it as one of the most trusted partners in the space. Just as importantly, Chainguard’s approach aligned with how GovSignals’ engineers wanted to work. The containers integrated clearly into existing GitHub workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes deployments, without introducing new friction or operational overhead.

Onboarding was fast. On the first day of access, the team was able to swap in Chainguard base images and begin using them in staging. When Chainguard later introduced the self-service capability, enabling GovSignals to provision their own images, adoption accelerated even further, making it easier for the team to scale usage across environments while maintaining a consistent security baseline.

Today, Chainguard Containers serve as the foundation for nearly all containerized workloads in GovSignals’ FedRAMP High and IL5 environments. As a Chainguard Catalog customer, GovSignals can take advantage of over 2,000 different open source projects built by Chainguard, ensuring that every use case is addressed. By standardizing on trusted, minimal base images maintained by Chainguard, the team eliminated a major source of vulnerability risk while preserving the developer experience required to move quickly in highly regulated environments.

Beyond the product itself, the Chainguard team plays an active role in making the GovSignals teams successful. From onboarding through day-to-day questions, Conner and team work closely with their Chainguard account and support teams, combining strong technical guidance with a high-touch, responsive partnership.

The results

From 10,000+ CVEs to a clean security baseline

The impact was immediate and measurable. Across GovSignals’ base images, the team reduced more than 10,000 CVEs to zero, largely by standardizing on Chainguard Containers. Any remaining vulnerabilities were tied to application-level dependencies, not the underlying OS, Conner explained.

This clean foundation enabled GovSignals to build a highly automated security workflow without drowning in noise. Vulnerability scanning became meaningful instead of overwhelming, allowing the team to focus on real risk rather than chasing endless remediation tasks. Chainguard integrated cleanly into GovSignals’ custom CI/CD pipeline, supporting automated scans on every pull request and enabled faster, more confident remediation when issues did arise.

FedRAMP High as a revenue driver

This improved security posture played a critical role in GovSignals achieving FedRAMP High Authorization, which unlocked an entirely new class of customers, including organizations working exclusively with the DoD and handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). With FedRAMP High in place, GovSignals was able to both expand existing enterprise relationships and bring on new customers operating at massive federal scale.

As Conner explained, security didn’t just remove friction; it actively closed deals. “One Fortune 500 defense contractor assumed a startup couldn’t meet their security requirements. When they saw we were on track for FedRAMP High, it became the deciding factor. That deal closed because of security.”

For GovSignals, security had stopped being risk mitigation and had become a growth enabler with a clear return on investment. “Security wasn't blocking deals; it was the unlock for an entire market segment we couldn't touch otherwise,” Conner said.

Today, GovSignals works with large enterprises managing billions of dollars in federal contract revenue. Achieving FedRAMP High transformed compliance from a gating factor into a growth lever, enabling the company to serve some of the most security-sensitive customers in government.

More innovation, less remediation

Reaching this level of security and compliance did not come at the expense of engineering velocity. GovSignals avoided dedicating scarce engineering resources to ongoing container hardening and vulnerability remediation. Instead, the team remains focused on building product, improving automation, and expanding platform capabilities for its customers.

Chainguard also reshaped the team's thinking about open source at scale. GovSignals gained confidence that open source software, when paired with a secure, well-maintained foundation, can meet the most demanding federal security requirements without slowing innovation.

Together, the results allowed GovSignals to grow faster, serve more highly regulated customers, and maintain startup momentum while operating at the security standard required by the U.S. federal government.