Before you win the federal contract, you must prove you have the ability and resources to handle it.
Federal contracts can be extensive to fulfill, but getting one can easily change your business fortune and credibility. Contractors are also at higher risk since hackers always target government data, making them a threat.
Therefore, the federal government takes all precautions to ensure the data it gives you is safe. First, there are measures stipulated within the NIST 800-171 compliance standard that you must fulfill to prove data safety and security preparedness.
Not all contractors meet all these plans, and many fail to get the contracts due to deficiencies and lack of compliance. Therefore, to win your next contract, here are ways to navigate the compliance standard and come on top.
1. Create Comprehensive Documentation
NIST 800-171 is a guideline for all organizations to abide by various security frameworks and data protection guidelines.
Before performing what the contract stipulates, you must prove to the agency that you have all the security frameworks to safeguard and protect all the data you will be given. This is why you need documentation indicating your compliance and approach to data security.
You can do that alone with the in-house team. However, it is best to hire someone with complex NIST 800-171 compliance knowledge. With the help of the experts, you can document and enforce your organizational approach to data protection requirements.
Since you may have limited information about safeguarding classified data, you need external help and documentation guidelines. This will be the handbook for your employees while executing the contract to ensure they adhere to the necessary data requirements.
2. Conduct A Gap Assessment
The primary purpose of this assessment is to reveal what you have and areas you need to improve. Every organization doesn’t meet all the security standards and requirements. On most occasions, the majority are likely to mist specific guidelines and resources. This is because your company needs to abide by too many compliance frameworks.
Before you get the contract, the federal agency may conduct an organizational assessment and background check. To avoid any disappointments, conduct gap assessments frequently.
Based on the assessment revelation, be ready to implement new guidelines to conform to the standards and reinstitute what is missing. With the help of experts, you can use different outsourced tools to do the assessment and then update your systems based on the discoveries.
3. Conduct Regular Assessments
Despite your company’s stringent security measures and practices, you must always up your game and update your system. To know what to update and add to the security framework, you need to do frequent assessments. Focus mainly on audits to help you understand your system’s resilience and any issues with your security practices,
Rather than allowing your team to do all the auditing, outsource security audit experts. The benefit of relying on third-party security experts is their knowledge and experience with NIST 800-171. Ideally, they can always tell what you are missing and areas where you are excelling. They also bring the expertise, insightful eyes, and vision your employees and internal teams may never have.
Besides relying on such help, you also need internal assessment tools. With the help of such tools, you can always launch continuous improvements and upgrades quickly.
4. Institute A Response Plan
As much as you plan for all the security measures and instill preventive measures, you must be ready for an attack. You can never predict an attack and seal all the potential loopholes. That is why you have an incident response plan committed to mitigating the effectiveness of the attacks and getting ahead of everything.
The goal of an attack is always to mitigate and reduce the potential damage, and you can only do so with a good response plan. Therefore, with the help of your employees and other professionals, create a response plan backed by the NIST 800-171 complaint practices.
The perfect response plan must have all the critical components, beginning with a measure to get ahead and stop the ongoing disruption. Next, detail how everyone will respond to other issues, including communication with parties directly interacting with the business. Remember to include what everyone will do to stop the attack and their specific duties based on job titles and roles.
Finally, plan how to communicate the attack to all parties, but mainly to the federal agencies you are in contract with. Remember to revise all the details based on your assessment to make your compliance documentation more comprehensive than other organizations.
5. Develop All Security Controls
These controls are intended to prevent attacks by responding to specific risks. Before you begin writing the compliance plan, remember to assess your organization for potential risks and attacks. An effective control standard targets various risks based on clarifications. Only then can the team know the most effective measure for each risk.
Therefore, your control should be a response to potential issues you may face in the future. Document the entire control process to help your team follow the playbook if the attack manifests.
For every measure, include a corrective action that may be implemented after thwarting the attack. Update the corrective action guideline to account for the recent attacks and ensure they don’t reappear.
Summing Up
Complying with the NIST 800-171 standards requires proper documentation backed by actions to show you are prepared to handle federal contracts. Therefore, have a comprehensive preparedness and compliance plan with various plans.
Account for every risk, uncertainty, and emergency and conduct assessments to improve your security preparedness.