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Take Advantage of Microsoft Tools for CMMC Acceleration

As your organization prepares to meet the requirements of the CMMC 2.0, it’s important to take advantage of resources that can help you on your path to compliance. Microsoft offers helpful tools as part of their CMMC Acceleration Program that can support your Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification journey.

While these tools cannot guarantee an outcome for CMMC certification, they can help you to speed your process, improve your security posture, and reduce your overall risk in advance of a formal CMMC review.

 

Get to know the Microsoft Compliance Ecosystem

Leverage Microsoft’s investment in controls to meet your regulatory requirements. The tools are available for the DIB to secure itself, if not for the pending regulation, for the national security implications. Maryam Rahmani, Global Black Belt for the Microsoft 365 Government Cloud and CMMC at Microsoft, recently returned to CMMC CON to lay out Microsoft’s portfolio and how it can be implemented.  Below are some of the tools Microsoft offers to support your path to improving cybersecurity and, ultimately, achieving compliance with CMMC.

Service Trust Portal

Microsoft provides one of the most trusted clouds available. Their offerings meet many different regulatory frameworks. Access the trust portal and to get the information you need, including audit reports and more, on how they meet their obligations. See how you can benefit from the shared responsibility model where your organization can leverage and inherit Microsoft compliance.

Microsoft Purview

This governance, risk, and compliance platform enables you to see your compliance posture and figure out how it is improving as you move through your journey. By looking at a dashboard, you can see your compliance status, via a score, and quickly gain visibility into how you stack up and what actions you can potentially take to improve your scores over time. You can use the dashboard to demonstrate to your colleagues and management that you are making an effort to become more secure and compliant per the given regulation that your industry may be under. Within the compliance management tool, you also have access to useful assessment templates.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

This cloud security, posture management, and cloud workload protection solution allows you to assess and visualize your resources, whether they are in Azure, on-prem, or in other clouds. It also provides a dashboard with an overall security posture score for your entire environment. With CMMC 2.0/NIST special publication 800-171 built in, it allows you to see compliance against that regulatory standard.

Defender for Cloud also has the ability to support hybrid cloud workloads, as well as built-in AI and automation to eliminate false alarms and data and give you a very cohesive picture of your security posture—allowing you to quickly identify the threats and figure out how to proceed with your investigation.

Microsoft Sentinel

This tool is Microsoft’s native security incident event management solution. The CMMC 2.0 version takes into account up to 25 of Microsoft products or solutions that you can leverage. It then allows you to apply analytic rules and playbooks. The result is data that helps you figure out where you stack against the requirement, identifies issues, and enables you to react and to fix those issues.

Sentinel doesn’t require a lot of investment in hardware. It allows you to take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud, delivering substantial benefit from day one.

 

Learn more about the Microsoft CMMC Acceleration Program

 

Cybersecurity has always been about people, processes, and technology. Your company needs to make sure you’re pulling on the right levers and implementing your controls correctly. Often it helps to work with a partner who is well-versed with the government regulation you are looking to meet and understands the Microsoft Government Cloud to help you in your journey. That’s CyberSheath. Contact us to get started on your compliance journey.