Practitioner-depth guides on FISMA, FedRAMP, CMMC, DCAA audit readiness, and AI governance for federal systems. Written by a CPA, CISSP, CISA with Big 4 audit experience.
What is your Supplier Performance Risk System (SPRS) score right now? Not the score you submitted. The score that reflects your actual implementation status today, measured against the 110 controls in NIST SP 800-171 Rev...
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Contractor A had 340 workstations, four office locations, a shared IT environment spanning HR, finance, and engineering, and a standard enterprise network where everyone accessed everything. When their Certified Third-Party Assessment Organization (C3PAO) showed up,...
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FedRAMP has been running essentially the same authorization process for fifteen years. Cloud service providers submit narrative security packages, assessors review documentation, the Program Management Office (PMO) validates controls, and an agency issues an Authorization...
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FedRAMP processed more than 100 Rev5 authorizations in 2025. Not one included an Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) submission. That number is not a rounding error. FedRAMP published machine-readable packaging requirements years before Rev5 went...
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The EU AI Act covers 450 million people and governs every organization that deploys AI systems touching EU residents. Most compliance teams know about the high-risk system obligations, the conformity assessments, the technical documentation requirements....
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The QSA flagged it on day two of the on-site assessment. A payment page was loading three JavaScript files from external CDNs that had no inventory entry, no integrity hash, and no authorization record. The...
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Most organizations treating the EU AI Act as a 2026 problem have already made a costly mistake. The high-risk AI requirements, the transparency obligations, the conformity assessments: those timelines run into 2026 and beyond. But...
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Most security and compliance leaders know their cloud provider carries SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications. Many assume those certifications cover their organization's compliance obligations. They do not. AWS's SOC 2 report attests...
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Every risk assessment I reviewed during my first decade in cybersecurity consulting ended the same way: a heat map. Red squares in the upper-right corner. Yellow squares cascading down the middle. Green squares along the...
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When Sarbanes-Oxley took effect in 2002, the defense contractor community watched from a distance. SOX was a public company problem. Four years later, when the first generation of defense contractors faced DCAA audit challenges tied...
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Only 21% of organizations report mature AI governance programs [Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise, 8th Edition, 2026]. That figure is not surprising in isolation. What makes it striking is the context: 88% of...
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Organization A runs its compliance program the way most organizations do. A compliance manager owns a spreadsheet of 180 controls across SOC 2 and HIPAA. Every 90 days, she emails 14 system owners asking for...
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