Determining your CMMC compliance level



Every business needs to achieve at least Foundational CMMC compliance in order to do business with the DoD. But ideally, every business should achieve Expert-level CMMC compliance.



Whether it’s practical for your company to get to Expert-level compliance – and whether it’s a worthwhile goal – requires evaluation of several factors.


You should also perform an assessment of your supply chain and the vendors in it.
Do your vendors have a history of breaches that could jeopardize your supply chain cyber
security?
Do they already demonstrate cybersecurity compliance, or has that historically been a challenge for them?
The stronger the cybersecurity hygiene of your vendors, the easier it will be for you to achieve Expert-level compliance.
Consider, too, the cost of CMMC compliance. Even if you self-attest, collecting and reporting the data required to certify your compliance can require a significant investment of resources. And the more controls you need to meet, the higher your compliance costs will be.
Also, CMMC compliance must be demonstrated on a yearly basis in order to meet the government’s requirements. Of course, you can streamline compliance reporting costs by using tools that can automatically assess risk for you. These tools can drastically cut down on resource costs and time spent on manual processing.