CMMC compliance for software contractors. Done in 60 to 75 days, not six months.

For most DoD software contracts, yes. The standard DFARS 252.227-7013 / 7014 data rights clauses, plus the contract Statement of Work, will tell you which deliverables the government has rights in. When the customer is funding the code or claiming Government Purpose Rights, the source qualifies as Controlled Technical Information, a CUI category. Internal product code your firm developed at private expense and licenses to the government typically does not. We separate the two during the scoping call so the CMMC boundary contains only what actually has to be in scope.

Whenever the contract anticipates the contractor handling Covered Defense Information (CDI), the contracting officer is required to include DFARS 252.204-7012. For software firms, that almost always means source code, mission data, government test data, or design and engineering data is in scope. The 7012 clause requires NIST 800-171 implementation, cyber incident reporting to DC3 within 72 hours, and flow-down to subcontractors handling the same data. Once the CMMC final rule fully phases in, DFARS 252.204-7021 layers the CMMC Level requirement on top.

If your build pipeline produces or transports CUI, yes. That includes Jenkins or GitHub Actions runners that compile customer-funded code, container registries that hold customer-deliverable images, signing infrastructure (Sigstore, Cosign, KMS-backed signing keys), and deployment runners that push to government environments. Many shops scope only the developer laptop and the source repo, then get caught by the assessor when the build server turns out to be sitting in a different VPC with a different identity boundary. We document the entire pipeline as one contiguous CUI boundary or, in some cases, as a clearly partitioned environment with documented controls at the boundary.

NIST 800-171 family 3.13 and 3.14, plus the new NIST SP 800-218 Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF), set the bar. In practice that means: branch protection and pull request approvals, mandatory SAST and SCA gates with documented triage SLAs, secret scanning, secure base images, signed commits and signed artifacts, reproducible builds where feasible, and a documented vulnerability disclosure path. We map your existing tools (whichever you use) onto the SSDF practices and write the SSP narrative around it. We do not force you to switch tools.

Executive Order 14028 and OMB Memorandum M-22-18 require federal agencies to obtain a self-attestation from software producers that they follow secure software development practices, plus an SBOM in many cases. The attestation form was published by CISA. We provide an OMB M-22-18 attestation template, an SBOM tooling narrative (CycloneDX or SPDX), and an SSDF mapping, all written so a contracting officer's representative can accept it without follow-up questions.

Many DoD contracts require government developer accounts inside the contractor's environment. Treat them like any other privileged user: federated identity into your IdP (typically with the customer's CAC-backed login), separation of duties, audit logging on every privileged action, conditional access policies based on device posture, and offboarding the same business day the contract option is not exercised or a clearance lapses. We document the federation pattern, the audit retention period, and the offboarding runbook in the SSP.

FedRAMP and CMMC overlap heavily but do not replace each other. FedRAMP authorizes a cloud service offering for federal use under NIST 800-53. CMMC governs the contractor's own internal environment under NIST 800-171. If you run a FedRAMP Moderate authorized SaaS that DoD customers use, your customer-facing system inherits most controls from FedRAMP, but your internal development, build, and engineering environment still falls under CMMC. We map the inheritance so you do not double-document, and we identify which CMMC controls remain your responsibility regardless of FedRAMP authorization.

CMMC Level 1 from $6,997 flat, 21-day delivery, no third-party assessor required.

CMMC Level 2 documentation package from $24,997 flat, 60 to 75 day delivery. The required C3PAO assessment fee runs $30K to $50K and is engaged separately. We disclose that on every pricing card so the total budget is transparent up front.

CMMC Level 3 is custom-scoped after a discovery call. DIBCAC-led assessment is government-administered.