Right now it is hard, and the reason is supply. By the Defense
Department’s own account, more than 100,000 companies in the defense
industrial base will need a third-party CMMC assessment, and only around
100 assessors were approved to perform them, as reported by
DefenseScoop from DoD’s own leadership (as of July 2026). That is roughly one assessor for
every thousand companies that need one. The practical answer is not to
wait for an assessor to become available. It is to do your readiness
work now, so that when a contract requires certification you are already
prepared and in line, not just starting.
What does CMMC readiness
actually mean?
Readiness is the work you do before an assessor ever shows up:
understanding which level applies to you, mapping your current security
against the required controls, closing the gaps, and documenting
everything so it can be verified. Done well, it turns the assessment
itself from a gamble into a formality. None of it requires an assessor.
All of it requires starting.
Which CMMC level applies to
you?
Most defense contractors that handle controlled unclassified
information (CUI) are looking at CMMC Level 2, which aligns to a defined
set of security requirements and, for many companies, calls for a
third-party assessment rather than a self-attestation. Knowing your
level is the first thing an honest readiness review establishes, because
it determines everything that follows: the controls you need, the
documentation you need, and whether an independent assessor is in your
future at all.
Why
does the assessor bottleneck make waiting expensive?
When demand for assessments outruns the supply of assessors by
roughly a thousand to one, the queue starts to decide who can bid. If a
contract requires CMMC and you are not ready, you do not get more time.
You get passed over, and the work goes to a competitor who prepared
earlier. The contractors doing readiness work now are not just compliant
sooner. They are eligible sooner, while everyone else is still waiting
for an appointment.
What is the readiness
sequence?
Four steps, in order:
- Gap assessment. Establish where your current
security actually stands against your required level. Not where you
believe it stands: where the evidence says it stands. - Close the gaps. Fix the shortfalls in priority
order, before an assessor is in the room. This is where most of the real
work lives. - Document. Build the evidence an assessor needs to
verify, not just claims. In an assessment, undocumented security might
as well not exist. - Schedule. Get in line for assessment from a
position of readiness rather than scrambling when a contract forces the
issue.
Where does an enclave fit
into this?
For many small contractors, the single biggest readiness accelerator
is shrinking what has to be assessed in the first place. An enclave
walls your CUI into one bounded, hardened environment so the
requirements apply there rather than across your whole company. We
explain the approach fully in our enclave guide, and how it compares to
a
whole-environment move. If your defense work is
a fraction of your business, scope reduction is usually step zero.
What
if you have already passed a readiness review before?
Readiness is not a one-time event, because your environment does not
hold still. New hires, new systems, and new contracts all move CUI
around. If your readiness work is more than a year old, treat it as a
starting point to re-verify rather than a certificate to lean on.
Passing an audit and staying defensible are different things, a
distinction our team has written about before.
Who should you trust to help?
Someone whose role in the ecosystem you can verify. Simpatico Systems
is a Registered Provider Organization (RPO) with the CMMC accreditation
body, and we act as the compliance consulting partner through the whole
process: scoping, gap work, documentation, and assessment preparation.
One thing to understand about the model, because it protects you: the
final assessment is performed by an independent certified third party
assessor organization (C3PAO) that evaluates compliance and reports the
results, not by the consultant who prepared you. That separation is
deliberate. Be wary of anyone who offers to be both.
What should a
small contractor do this quarter?
Get the gap assessment done. It is the one step that costs the least,
unblocks everything else, and tells you the true size of your project
instead of the feared size. Schedule
a strategy session and we will scope where you actually stand.
If a contract you wanted required CMMC certification next quarter,
would you be bidding or watching? If the answer is watching, the queue
is the reason to start now.