Compliance Standards

To secure Department of Defense (DoD) and other government contracts, organizations must demonstrate compliance with specific frameworks that help protect federal contract information (FCI) and controlled unclassified information (CUI), such as CMMC 2.0 and NIST SP 800-171. NIST SP 800-53 Rev 4 provides a complementary framework, but it’s not mandatory like the other two. Still, SP 800-53 substantially informs and maps to SP 800-171 and CMMC 2.0.

In November 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) introduced major updates to the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification(CMMC) program. These changes left many organizations in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) wondering: Do we still need to comply with CMMC certification requirements?

The short answer is yes, but the more important question is which Level of CMMC certification applies to your organization. The required Level depends on the type of sensitive data you handle in your current or prospective DoD contracts. Understanding this distinction is critical, as it determines the cybersecurity controls you must implement—and how soon you need to meet them.