There are several compliance standards for federal and defense cybersecurity. CMMC, FedRAMP, the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and the Risk Management Framework (RMF) all serve critical functions in protecting government IT systems and associated vendor products and services.

Behind all of these frameworks are crucial security publications, each one serving a particular purpose in defining the practices, controls and procedures that organizations can use to meet their compliance demands. We’ve previously covered such documents as NIST 800-53 and NIST 800-171, showing how these documents play a role in national cyber defense.

In this article, we’ll discuss two more guidelines: Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 199 and FIPS 200.

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When large tech companies talk about cybersecurity, compliance and risk management, it usually sounds like something for the big players. That is, large enterprise operations or businesses that would be the target of major attacks. The truth is, however, that our data-driven economy levels the playing field in many ways. One of these ways, unfortunately, is by making small businesses just as vulnerably to cyber attacks as their larger counterparts. 

According to IBM, 2021 saw the highest average costs for breaches. On average, data breaches costs businesses in the United States up to $4.24M. While that doesn’t mean that your breach could cost you that much, it’s important to know that, no matter the size of your business, you need to take cybersecurity seriously.

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The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) framework is a relatively new yet still partially implemented set of cybersecurity regulations targeting DoD agencies and contractors. The DoD specifically built the rules to address the IT infrastructure and security practices needed to handle Federal Contract Information (FCI) and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). After a lengthy review, the DoD has, as of November 2021, released an updated version of CMMC, known colloquially as CMMC 2.0.

What is CMMC 2.0? We’ll cover some of the more significant changes here, what this means for DoD contractors, and how you can prepare for the change.

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