Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

ISO 27001 is a very useful certification for just about any company operating abroad. Comparable in many ways to NIST-based frameworks like CMMC in the United States, ISO 27001 is an international standard built to help organizations of all sizes, in all industries, across all regions of the world, to obtain a high level of standardized information security.

FedRAMP is a government-wide program meant to ensure a standardized baseline for information security throughout the cloud service providers working with the federal government. It’s a tall order. Setting forth standards that are robust enough to cover all the bases, while being open and flexible enough to cover every CSP, is not easy.

FedRAMP is the federal government’s framework for evaluating and enforcing standardized security across the cloud service providers operating as contractors. They take security seriously, and the protection of controlled information is their top priority. A key part of validating the security of a CSP is the SAR, or Security Assessment Report. What is the SAR, and how do FedRAMP agencies evaluate SAR submissions?

Companies that need to comply with CMMC to earn their governmental contracts have a lot of work ahead of them. Securing their systems against intrusion and protecting data from breaches, malicious actors, and snooping is all part and parcel of the program. One aspect of information security that can be distressingly easy to overlook is disposal.

Here on the Ignyte blog, we talk a lot about ISO 27001 as a valuable international framework for information security. We also frequently touch on two related documents: ISO 27002 and Annex A. As you may know, ISO/IEC, the organization responsible for developing the various ISO standards, has a lot of different standards for a lot of different purposes.

As one of the most common information security frameworks in the world, ISO 27001 is used by tens of thousands of organizations worldwide. That means it has to fit a lot of different groups with a lot of different needs. It also means that there’s a lot of information pertaining to ISO 27001 within each of those companies. Data like the logs of access control systems, the chain of custody for sensitive information, and the results of audits are all stored somewhere.

Ask anyone on the outside of information security what the most important part of the industry is, and you’ll get a lot of different answers, but among them will be cryptography. Using strong encryption to hide information where it can’t be accessed without the proper authorization makes a lot of sense, and the idea of strong cryptography has saturated popular culture.

Here on the Ignyte blog, we talk a lot about the most important cybersecurity frameworks for the federal government, including FedRAMP and CMMC. There’s a lot that goes into these frameworks, with contributors all across the information security world, but one of the more important agencies is DISA. The United States Defense Information Systems Agency, formerly known as the Defense Communications Agency, is the DoD sub-agency responsible for IT services and security for the Department of Defense.

We’ve known it’s been coming, but it’s finally here: CMMC is no longer optional. Approval to issue the new Final Rule was fast-tracked, and the deadline is looming.

CMMC is a strict and difficult standard to meet, which leads a lot of companies to wonder: how necessary is it, really? After all, CMMC is not alone in the world of security and compliance. There are a lot of other frameworks, both within the United States (like FedRAMP) or internationally (like ISO 27001). Companies that meet other compliance standards and have systems in place, like an ISMS or a QMS, might wonder: Is CMMC still required?