Advantage Industries helps DOD contractors throughout the Baltimore, MD, Northern Virginia and Washington, DC area to meet NIST 800-171, DFARS and CMMC requirements.
Professional CMMC Consulting is essential to obtaining CMMC certification and acquiring DOD contracts.
Since November 2020, organizations in the Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore MD area seeking DOD contracts have had to post NIST 800-171 Compliance Scores in the Supplier Performance Risk System (SPRS). Unfortunately, the DOD discovered that many contractors in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) were not taking the requirements of NIST 800-171 seriously and were either grossly inflating their scores or outright lying about their compliance with NIST 800-171.
As a result, the DOD created DFARS 7021 which authorized the creation of the Cyber Security Maturity Model or CMMC. At its core, CMMC is an enforcement mechanism to ensure that companies in the DIB are complying with the requirements of NIST 800-171. Among other things, it mandates independent 3rd party CMMC assessments for contractors seeking DOD contracts. Failure to pass these assessments can result in disqualification, the loss of existing contracts, and charges of fraud for company executives.
CMMC Consulting from Advantage Industries’ certified experts will help you to prepare your organization for certification. In addition, our approach to CMMC compliance is less costly than many of the other approaches out there.
CMMC is a set of regulations designed to protect sensitive “non-public information” that is provided to the DIB as part of the DODs procurement process. The regulations are designed to protect this “non-public information” from being obtained by our adversaries. While by itself, none of this information is “classified”, if an adversary collected enough of this information, they could start to piece together what the DOD is working on, who to target for further clandestine activities, etc. As a result, the DOD wants to make sure that ALL companies in the DIB are maintaining a minimum baseline of Data Security.
They have established three levels of Data Security that contractors will need to be able to prove that they are meeting in order to win or retain DOD contracts.
Advantage’s CMMC Consulting Program will take you through a structured process that will enable your organization to gain and maintain compliance with the appropriate level of security controls for CMMC compliance.
At Advantage industries, we offer compliance services that improve your firm’s ability to identify and respond to cyberthreats. Our managed security service provides:
A certified CMMC Compliance Expert can help guide your organization through the changes required to become CMMC Compliant. Much more than just a set of IT Security Tools that your IT team could install, CMMC Compliance requires that you look at all aspects of your organization, develop policies and procedures that will ensure the Data Security of sensitive information and then implement those policies and procedures so that they become part of the DNA of your organization.
Advantage Industries has a standardized approach to accomplish this. We meet with your team regularly to help them analyze your business processes and to write the necessary policies and procedures to meet the CMMC requirements. Then we continue to meet with you and help you evaluate your compliance, identify gaps, and to remediate the gaps to remain compliant. Most companies are ill equipped to take on this challenge on their own. It takes a certified expert to do this properly.
CMMC compliance is NOT a destination that you attain and then forget about. CMMC compliance mandates that you self-assess your organization and report your SPRS score every year. In addition, every 3 years, you will be required to submit to a 3rd party assessment to validate your compliance. Throughout this time, the DOD can send out an assessor at any time to assess you. In addition, the regulations require that you do certain things throughout the year.
All of this means that consistent vigilance is required to maintain CMMC compliance. This is what Advantage’s CMMC compliance program is designed to deliver.
No matter which level of CMMC compliance you need to attain, Advantage Industries’ Columbia, MD based team of compliance experts will work with you to implement a cost-effective compliance strategy. Our unique program helps to decrease the complexity that many businesses associate with data security compliance.
Sr. Director of Sales, PMP
