How to Conduct a CMMC Readiness Assessment (Step-by-Step)
From scoping data flows to the final gap analysis. We break down the 4 phases of assessing your CMMC readiness against NIST 800-171 controls.
With the CMMC final rule published, the Department of Defense (DoD) has moved from self-attestation to requiring mandatory third-party verification for suppliers and partners.
There are roughly 300,000 contractors in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), many requiring Level 2 certification, and a severe shortage of certified auditors (C3PAOs). If you wait until a contract requires compliance to start preparing, you’ll likely be too late.
To survive this transition, you need to get moving and one of the best ways to see how prepared you are for CMMC compliance is to undertake a CMMC readiness assessment.
What is a CMMC Readiness Assessment?
A CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) Readiness Assessment is essentially a mock audit designed to simulate the process your organization would go through during a formal CMMC Level 2 assessment. It evaluates your organization’s cybersecurity maturity against the 110 controls of NIST 800-171, identifying gaps in evidence, documentation, and implementation so that you know what you need to fix and implement before a formal C3PAO auditor arrives.
Unlike the actual certification assessment, which is pass/fail, a readiness assessment is diagnostic. It is typically performed by a Registered Provider Organization (RPO) or a consultant who understands the CMMC Assessment Process.
Why You Need a Readiness Assessment
In the commercial world, compliance can sometimes feel a little hand-wavy.
If you’ve been through a SOC 2 audit, you know there is often wiggle room. You might show an auditor a policy, explain a mitigating control, and they might accept it based on a conversation.
CMMC does not work that way. It is incredibly prescriptive and binary.
The DoD doesn't care if you intended to encrypt that hard drive. They care if you have the specific encryption implemented and enabled and expect evidence to prove it.
A readiness assessment functions as a gap analysis on your evidence, not just your intentions.
The 4 Phases of Assessing CMMC Readiness
Phase 1: Scoping and Data Flow Mapping
The most critical outcome of a readiness assessment is narrowing the scope of what needs to be audited (AKA scoping).
For most organizations, you want to keep the area of your business that needs to be CMMC compliant as small as possible as attempting to bring your entire corporate network, every salesperson's laptop, and every HR system up to government standards in very costly — both financially and operationally.
The very first step of a readiness assessment should be to define exactly where Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) lives.
If we can define that CUI only enters your organization through one specific portal, lives in one isolated AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), and is accessed by only three specific infrastructure engineers, we have drastically limited the scope of the audit.
- Without a boundary: You are patching, monitoring, and documenting 500 endpoints.
- With a boundary: You are securing three laptops and one cloud environment.
If you don't define these boundaries well upfront, you risk every system in your organization needing to be CMMC compliant.
Phase 2: The Gap Analysis
Once we know what to assess, we look at how it's protected, evaluating your current state against the 110 controls in NIST SP 800-171 (required for CMMC Level 2).
At this pages you’re looking for:
- Technical gaps: e.g., "MFA is not enabled on the switch management console."
- Documentation gaps: e.g., "The Incident Response Plan doesn't reference CUI specifically."
- Process gaps: e.g., "Offboarding happens, but there is no paper trail confirming access removal from key systems within 24 hours."
Each control should be scored with: MET, NOT MET or Not Applicable (NA). Any that are not met, will need to be fixed and for any that are not applicable you’ll need to explain why as a C3PAO will need to include a statement to support why a control is not applicable during an official audit.
Phase 3: Remediation
Once gaps are identified, start the process of remediation. This can involve implementing missing security controls, updating policies, training employees, and documenting all completed actions.
Plans of Action & Milestones (POA&Ms) should be created for security controls that cannot be implemented before the audit.
Note: Under CMMC 2.0, not all controls can be put on a POA&M. Critical controls must be met prior to the assessment.
At this stage, you’ll also need to develop your System Security Plan (SSP). The SSP is one of the first documents a C3PAO will look at during your assessment and details how your organization protects CUI within your environment.
Phase 4: The Readiness Assessment
This is where your RPO will run through the mock assessment, mimicking the process a C3PAO will follow during the official audit. Your RPO will be looking for any gaps not yet met and other points of failure you’ll need to address before you’re ready to go through the official assessment.
The Cost of Readiness: Budgeting for 2026
For a mid-sized defense contractor, a third-party Readiness Assessment/Gap Analysis can range from $10,000 to $40,000+, depending on the complexity of your network and the scope of your assessment.
What many organizations often overlook is the number of internal hours required from your IT and engineering teams to implement the needed controls and policies to meet CMMC standards. If you don't have a dedicated security team, this pulls your best engineers away from revenue-generating product work.
Common Failure Points (Where Companies Get Stuck)
After working with a number of organizations working towards CMMC certification, here’s where many trip themselves up:
- Flow-Down Requirements: As a DoD contractor, you’re responsible for ensuring your entire supply chain is CMMC compliant. This means checking all subcontractors and essential software providers you use meet the requirements. If they don’t, it’s on you.
- Evidence: Simply handing over documentation without evidence of it in action isn’t enough — CMMC doesn’t just require you to write policies and procedures, assessors need proof you actually use them.
- Assessment Scope Creep: If you create a CUI enclave to avoid your entire organization needing to meet CMMC requirements, you need to ensure that you stick to it and that CUI doesn’t flow out of that enclave, otherwise you’ll have critical security gaps.
Final Thoughts
The Department of Defense has made their position clear: security is a foundational requirement, not an add-on.
When you are bidding on a contract six months from now, the contracting officer is going to prioritize the company that is already CMMC certified (or has a verified high SPRS score) over the one that is still promising to get to it "soon."
The bottleneck of certified C3PAO auditors is real, and the line is getting longer every day. Don't wait for a contract requirement to trigger your panic. Treat a CMMC Readiness Assessment as a competitive differentiator.
How Workstreet Helps Businesses Achieve CMMC Certification
You don’t have to tackle CMMC alone. Workstreet can help you automate your CMMC Level 1 or Level 2 compliance, protect FCI and CUI, and win contracts with a complete, AI-enabled security program, backed by the only AI-powered RPO.
Our approach covers scoping, gap assessments, remediation planning, and audit readiness. That means you save time, and stay focused on running your business while building a cost-effective, defense-grade security program. We’ve helped dozens of DoD contractors navigate the CMMC maze, without losing momentum or market opportunities.
