Over the past few decades, many of us have become accustomed to paying monthly fees for everything from vehicles to streaming services. The leasing model cuts through the red tape and affords us the freedom to cancel anytime. The trade-off is that we lose access to these services after we cancel the subscription.
This works well for Netflix, but not for services that are fundamental to your business.
This is why we caution against renting your CMMC enclave.
Many enclave providers will sell you a rented environment where they control the tenant, policies, and logs. Often, the upfront cost is lower, but this ties your business to them for the long haul.
It can be a great long-term strategy for the enclave provider as it ensures recurring revenue. But for businesses in need of these services, it can introduce unforeseen problems down the road.
What if your organization decides to migrate away due to poor service or a strategic pivot?
What if the provider goes out of business? (A hard lesson learned by PBS)
Or, what if, like a landlord, they continue to raise the rent on you over time?
The consequences are costly.
In these scenarios, leaving a leased enclave forces your organization to procure a brand-new environment, build the technical architecture from scratch, and go through a new CMMC assessment.
The operational disruption can be significant, far outweighing the initial cost savings of the enclave.
The reason a new enclave requires a new CMMC assessment is that a new environment introduces completely different tenants, policies, and workflows. This will need to undergo its own assessment to ensure CMMC compliance.
Even if your business has the cash on hand for that kind of migration, you are still looking at months of preparation and juggling of resources to manage the program.
We believe the best option for business continuity is to own your enclave. When you own the enclave, your compliance investment remains a business asset.
If you ever choose to change service providers or manage the infrastructure internally, the enclave stays with you. The underlying configuration, the historical logs, and the established assessment boundary remain fully intact.
We believe compliance should never be a tool for vendor captivity. This is why all of the enclave solutions we provide are built on the ownership model.
By prioritizing an ownership-based enclave architecture, defense contractors protect their margins, secure their operational agility, and ensure that their hard-earned CMMC certification remains firmly in their own hands.
If you are curious about enclaves, or other solutions for CMMC compliance? Speak to one of our experts today.