Buyer's Guide
How to Choose a C3PAO
Choosing the right assessor decides whether your certification holds up — and whether your investment is protected. The Defense Industrial Base built a shopping guide for exactly this. Here are the questions it says to ask, and how we answer every one.
Start With the Standard
The Industry's Own Shopping Guide
The National Defense Information Sharing & Analysis Center (ND-ISAC) — a non-profit built by defense contractors — published a free C3PAO Shopping Guide for small and medium businesses. It is a questionnaire and scoring tool across eleven categories, created by SMBs in the DIB to help their peers vet an assessor.
We didn't write it — the industry did. That is exactly why it carries weight: the questions come from the contractors being assessed, not the assessors selling the service. We think it is the best starting point for choosing a C3PAO, and we think you should hold us to every question in it.
Read the ND-ISAC Shopping Guide ↗On Price
"Cost Is Not Everything"
That is a direct quote from the ND-ISAC guide — and we agree. It warns SMBs away from the "race to the bottom" for the cheapest assessor, because a nullified assessment costs far more than it saves.
We don't post a rate card. We give you a customized, transparent quote based on your actual environment — scope, enclave size, external service providers, cloud, and SSP readiness all move the number. Ask us for one.
Hold Us To It
The Questions, Answered
These are the industry's questions, not ours. The ND-ISAC guide groups them into eleven areas — here is where we stand on each, in our own words. Ask us to go deeper on any of them.
We ask detailed scoping questions before we accept you as a client, and we review your System Security Plan for readiness — so you don't get halfway into an assessment and hit a disconnect. We are an Accredited C3PAO (ISO/IEC 17020:2012); verify us on the Cyber AB marketplace.
We are neither the "bottom of the barrel" the guide warns against, nor an assessor who draws unreasonable lines. Our evidence standards are fair and consistent, we are actively involved in scoping, and we apply the standard as written — because a defensible certification is the only kind worth having.
We can point you to named clients who went through it — on camera. Hear directly from Longeviti, DTS, IVA'AL Solutions, and DEFCERT on our testimonials page. Real results, real defense contractors.
Our Managing Principal helped write the assessment criteria — 17,000+ volunteer hours with the Cyber AB Standards Working Group and a President's Volunteer Service Award. We have conducted 150+ assessments and hold JSVA experience. Few assessors can say the same.
The guide cautions that assessors who specialize in other frameworks "can be found to be unreasonable compared to CMMC-specialized assessors." We are built around defense compliance — CMMC Level 2 and the Secure Controls Framework — not a commercial catalog of SOC 2, PCI, and HITRUST.
Enclave or full enterprise, MSP/ESP/CSP in scope, development labs, VDI, operational technology, multi-location and work-from-home — we assess DIB environments like yours every week, and we will tell you plainly how we approach the specifics of yours.
We staff every assessment with Certified CMMC Assessors on our own team, give you realistic timelines up front, and stay engaged after the report is delivered. With assessment demand outpacing capacity across the ecosystem, a real schedule matters — and we will tell you honestly when we can start.
You will have a named point of contact from the first call through the final report, and we tell you when to expect your quote. The communication you experience during intake is the communication you get throughout — no radio silence.
30+ years of DoD experience and a veteran-heavy team that has lived inside government contracting — not consultants who learned CMMC from the outside. We understand the DFARS clauses, the flow-downs, and the contract stakes because we have operated within them.
Our assessors are veterans — we served on land, sea and air and know the costs if contractors get it wrong. A certification that doesn't hold up doesn't just cost you a contract; it puts CUI, the supply chain, and the warfighter at risk. We understand those stakes firsthand, which is exactly why we assess to the standard and never to what's convenient.
Question categories referenced from the ND-ISAC C3PAO Shopping Guide for SMBs (Feb 2024). ND-ISAC is a non-profit defense-industry organization; this page references its guidance and is not affiliated with or endorsed by ND-ISAC.
Worth Noting
Authorized, and Now Accredited
When the ND-ISAC guide was written, it described C3PAOs as "authorized (and in the future accredited)." That future is here — and Cybersec Investments is Florida's only Accredited C3PAO, meeting the ISO/IEC 17020:2012 standard the program set as its highest bar.