CMMC Certification: How It Works and How to Achieve It

Summary:

This article explains how the CMMC certification model works for the DoD contractors and what those contractors must do to achieve them.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) introduced the CMMC certification for its contractors and subcontractors with the intent to make all their federal sensitive information and unclassified data safe against cyber-attacks. The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification or CMMC is a third-party certification but required for the contractors to prove their competence in protecting information and to sustain their contracts with the defense department.

The DoD recently amended the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement to include the CMMC framework early in 2021 in order to lead the DoD contractors to implement best practices for securing confidential federal information. With nearly 300,000 organizations or contractors present in the network of the U.S. defense, cybersecurity risks and overall threats to the sector are countless. While some have internal capabilities and resources to manage their risks, some outsource the responsibility to managed service providers. In such a backdrop of uneven security assurance for federal information, the U.S. Department of Defense introduced CMMC to ensure that more strict, appropriate and consistent cybersecurity controls and practices are placed within the contractors to safeguard their controlled unclassified information.

Here is further explanation of CMMC model to let you know how it works and how to prepare your organization for it.

What CMMC Means to DoD Contractors and How Does It work?

The CMMC is said to be the ‘validation component’ for DoD contractors with respect to implementing cybersecurity practices or processes and helping them to remain a part of defense sector. The DoD has recommended the contractors, including both primary and subcontractors, to achieve compliance with the CMMC requirements. It is a responsibility entrusted to the contractors and they need to ensure they comply with the cybersecurity practices to sustain their contracts with defense organizations.

A contractor can get the CMMC certification by implementing cybersecurity practices, according to the level appropriate to their organization’s processes and information systems. It needs to then pass an audit to be performed by a third-party assessor. The passing of the audit ensures that it meets the requirements for an appropriate level of the CMMC. There are five maturity levels of the CMMC, which range from basic cybersecurity Level 1 to advanced Level 5. Thus, with each maturity level, the controls and practices increase or get more complicated. The DoD contractors need to decide the level suitable for their organization according to the information handled, processes and systems for information exchange, and severity of their confidentiality.

What to Do To Achieve CMMC Certification?

The only certain way to get your organization prepared for CMMC accreditation is to pass the audit. First, depending on your current security procedures or programs, plan for at least six months time to evaluate the CMMC level and prepare for the audit.

Here is a simple roadmap to that:

1. Get a third-party assessment agency to help you assess your current cybersecurity posture with respect to the level required for your organization. You need to a find an agency that has comprehensive experience in different regulatory standards and can support you with consultation for preparing for the audit as well as with the assessment task.
2. Using the readiness assessment outcome, find any shortcomings in your cybersecurity approach and bridge those gaps before the final audit.
3. Retain the third-party assessor to do an audit.
4. Address any shortfalls if still prevalent to achieve the desired level of certification. You also need to prepare a plan of actions to maintain your cybersecurity practices and controls to keep up the contract with DoD.

A proper assessment agency is hence a fundamental need for a DoD contractor achieving the CMMC certification. They help to navigate the different complexities in the certification model and ensure that requirements are properly met. However, determining the specific CMMC level needed for an organization is challenging. It requires a deeper understanding of the requirements of each certification level and a critical evaluation of your own cybersecurity structure in the assessment process. The outcomes of your assessment must help you know the controls to information access, managers or administrators of information systems, processes or systems for storing data records, implementation of security controls, and the incident response plans. Without properly knowing these, you can certainly not identify the CMMC requirements for your organization and hence the level of certification. An experienced team of assessors can help you evaluate these and prepare for the audit.

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