Preparing for audits and inspections is a significant and sometimes overwhelming task. As the industry looks ahead to the rollout of CMMC, organizations must understand their security posture and identify gaps before hiring a third-party assessment organization. Without a thorough review of your compliance obligations and existing controls, security teams risk a failed audit and lost contract revenue.

Fortunately, the steps to conduct a gap assessment for any compliance framework follow a consistent pattern. Compliance teams must identify the requirements posed by a framework, then match existing company controls and evidence (activities, policies, and procedures) to those obligations. When identifying gaps, evidence needs to be designed to satisfy the requirement.

Many gap assessments are conducted in bulky excel spreadsheets, which can offer a good starting point but are too-often divorced from rapidly changing compliance environments. As policies, owners, and controls change, spreadsheets get left in the dust.

Enter ThreatSwitch's Compliance Navigator. The Compliance Navigator is a gap assessment and monitoring tool that dynamically connects to your day-to-day security controls. Whether focused on CMMC, NISPOM, NIST 800-171, DFARS, SOC, or other compliance challenges, ThreatSwitch makes it easy to identify potential compliance problems well in advance of costly audits. For NISPOM-focused customers, the Compliance Navigator is a powerful tool to streamline and automate self-inspection checklists.

To get started, model out your existing compliance requirements across different frameworks in the Compliance Navigator. If you have an existing spreadsheet of requirements or evidence, you can upload them directly to ThreatSwitch. Or, if you're beginning a gap assessment from scratch, ThreatSwitch provides templates for different frameworks such as CMMC.

As an audit nears, each requirement links to evidence stored in ThreatSwitch. For example, if a control exists to provide annual security training to employees, compliance managers can link to that training hosted in ThreatSwitch. By connecting controls to your live compliance execution, gathering evidence for an audit becomes a matter of a few clicks.

When you are finally working with an auditor, customers can grant a 3PAO access directly to the Compliance Navigator in ThreatSwitch. There's no need to email evidence back and forth with everything in one place.

Preparing for CMMC or looking for a new way to complete self-inspections? Check out the Compliance Navigator.