What Defense Contractors Need Before an Assessment
CMMC infrastructure readiness should begin long before a formal assessment is scheduled. For defense contractors, aerospace and defense organizations, regulated manufacturers, and suppliers supporting government contracts, the risk is not only failing an assessment. The larger risk is discovering too late that the IT environment behind the paperwork cannot prove what the policies claim.
CMMC is often discussed as a compliance framework, but for many organizations it is really a contract-readiness issue. The Defense Department’s CMMC program is designed to verify that contractors and subcontractors have implemented required cybersecurity standards for systems that process, store, or transmit Federal Contract Information (FCI) or Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).
That makes the infrastructure foundation critical. Identity, access control, endpoint management, logging, backup, recovery, monitoring, and evidence routines all need to work before an assessor starts asking questions.
