Continuing Your Compliance Journey in FutureFeed

Complying with DoD cybersecurity requirements not only protects your data and plays a role in strengthening our nation's data security, but it also provides an invaluable revenue source for Organizations Seeking Compliance (OSCs). There may come a time when your organization questions why it is important to maintain these requirements and do so in a GRC platform. This article explains why it is imperative to continue this journey in FutureFeed and the risks of ending that process.

If you would like a better understanding of the topics addressed in this article, schedule a Discovery Call (30 minutes or 60 minutes) to get a first-hand perspective on how your organization will benefit from adopting a continuous compliance posture and the critical role FutureFeed plays in this process.

3 Fundamental Questions:

As companies evaluate their compliance tracking and management options, companies must ask themselves three vital questions:

1. What is the total cost of ownership of this approach, including long-term operation and maintenance?
2. How can the information be provided to an Assessor?
3. Will using FutureFeed make this process more efficient and create a more seamless process for ongoing compliance requirement management?

The FutureFeed platform:

1. can pay for itself in operational efficiencies;
2. puts critical details at your teams', and your assessors', fingertips; and
3. streamlines the creation and maintenance of your organization's compliance program. 

This 3-minute platform overview video explains some of FutureFeed's powerful advantages, and we will touch on some of them below, too.

Total Cost of Ownership

Before FutureFeed, companies either used spreadsheets to identify and track the remediation of risks or used Governance Risk and Compliance ("GRC") platforms which typically focused on abstract problems and only offered nebulous solutions.  Neither offered practical solutions to the company's growing list of compliance requirements.

For example, while spreadsheets are good for tracking whether particular requirements are met, they are not good at managing the evidence necessary to prove compliance.  Most spreadsheets also lack automation, meaning users must enter and maintain redundant information across numerous tabs, such as the System Overview, SSP, and POA&Ms.  These inefficiencies lead to the company's staff spending significant time ensuring the information is properly maintained because even a minor clerical mistake can have a significant impact on to the company's reputation and ability to obtain contracts.

Although traditional GRC platforms have some powerful capabilities, they are often too difficult to configure and maintain, and too expensive, for many companies in the Defense Supply Chain.  These GRC platforms are designed to be flexible and customizable, allowing customers to define and manage their risks, including compliance risks.  But this strength is also the traditional GRC platforms' weakness. Configuring and maintaining them is often a full-time job and requires the help of outside consultants.  Coupled with their already high licensing costs, these costs push GRC platforms outside the reach of many in the Defense Supply Chain, where margins are already low. The smaller an organization is, the more affordable FutureFeed becomes.

Our pricing model for larger organizations is also designed to provide a more affordable platform as opposed to other GRC platforms. Through the automation built-in, the amount of hours FutureFeed saves an organization on structuring data, creating reports, and planning ahead for the future can save an organization thousands of dollars each year by not having to allocate the time to what would otherwise be manual projects.

Time Management and Opportunity Cost

Through the automation built into FutureFeed, our clients have saved tens to hundreds of hours compared to Excel sheets and other GRC platforms. From tagging documents to Practices, creating POA&M items during the self-assessment, the build-out of the SSP, and one-click report generation, FutureFeed provides the resources necessary to save an OSC much-needed time that can otherwise be allocated for additional projects. The amount of work for the team or person responsible for maintaining a compliant environment decreases and they have a support team of the platform they can rely on for any form of support. That includes complimentary training upon request or one-on-one time with our Customer Success Manager. The time saved using FutureFeed will justify and in many cases, outweigh the cost of an annual subscription. This metric only increases year after year. Most importantly, The Assessor has everything they need at their disposal to have a well-organized approach to the execution of the assessment. 

At a click of a button in FutureFeed, OSCs can create an export of their SSP and a secure zip-file that includes all created and uploaded files that provide the evidence required to justify the 320 objectives for the 110 controls for CMMC Level 2 being addressed. Eventually, the C3PAO will be able to have its version of FutureFeed based on the information you provide them to complete the assessment. The entire compliance process can be completed and managed in one living environment instead of an extensive Excel sheet with all supporting documents (hopefully) within a documentation server like SharePoint or OneDrive. Without FutureFeed, it becomes quite a challenge to keep everything organized.

Maintaining Compliance Over Time

Once the data is entered into FutureFeed, OSCs have created a strong, reliable systematic approach to updating their information and ensuring the interconnectivity of data remains aligned. Organizations change their business operation model and personnel quite often and those changes need to be documented. FutureFeed provides OSCs with the version history of documents like policies and procedures and the feasibility of creating supporting evidence of those documents' execution. With those tasks comes responsibility and accountability of people.

FutureFeed connects roles to users and allows a Responsible party and Accountable user to be assigned to a task, document, POA&M item, etc. as a part of the RACI model. This data is illustrated on the SSP so the OSC and Assessor can see who is responsible for that in case there is ever a need to question anyone involved in ensuring the compliance execution of certain requirements. 

Having features like these and many more at your disposal allows your organization to easily implement changes to the company information at every level necessary for cybersecurity compliance. There is no longer a need to manually update several places in an Excel sheet, or also in other platforms, just to illustrate one change. 

Starting from Scratch

It will take many hours to reproduce the efforts that go into building out this data into an Excel sheet or even another platform. The OSC will need to develop a new workflow for using whichever method they want to switch to. This raises a valuable question. Why switch from a platform that provides a sufficient management process to an Excel sheet that requires many more hours of effort for fewer results or a different platform that will most likely not have the same feature set FutureFeed provides?

This decision could delay the completion of certain projects and will make an OSC fall behind on necessary deadlines that management is reliant on. 

Questions? Contact support@futurefeed.co