MSPs Should Assess Operational Readiness Before Pursuing CMMC Work
Summary
The article advises MSPs to assess governance, data handling, access controls, evidence practices, and incident response readiness before taking on CMMC work, including the 72-hour incident reporting requirement.
Key points
- CMMC readiness involves operational ownership, documented processes, vendor responsibilities, and evidence—not just security tools.
- Tickets, logs, and security tools can bring sensitive data into an MSP’s systems; define collection and handling guardrails with customers.
- Use strong onboarding and offboarding, access reviews, training, and screening, particularly for export-controlled work.
- Adopt named accounts, MFA, least privilege, separation of standard and elevated access, and auditable activity records.
- Maintain trustworthy logs and records for access, changes, training, remediation, and incidents.
- Under DFARS 252.204-7012, cyber incidents must be reported within 72 hours of discovery; the article recommends 24/7 response coverage.
- MSPs not ready to support regulated defense environments can refer customers to a CMMC-focused provider.
Article Details
- Topic
- Operational readiness for MSPs considering CMMC-related defense work