IT Aligned to Your Framework

No — and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Certification and attestation come from independent parties: an authorized C3PAO for CMMC, a licensed CPA firm for SOC 2, your auditors and regulators elsewhere. Our role is the IT side: we assess your environment against the framework, implement and operate the controls, and keep the evidence audit-⁠ready. The separation between the people who prepare you and the people who assess you is deliberate, and it protects you.

It depends on who is asking. Department of Defense contracts and flow-⁠downs mean CMMC. Enterprise customers sending security questionnaires usually mean SOC 2. Retirement-⁠plan work brings the DOL’s cybersecurity best practices. Title and escrow underwriters look to ALTA Best Practices. Paid tax preparers are required to keep a written information security plan (WISP). Public-⁠sector work references NIST 800-⁠53. And if nobody is demanding anything yet, NIST CSF 2.0 is the foundation the others map back to — it is where we start every engagement.

Compliance programs start on Secure IT at $250 per user per month — Core IT is not an option for a regulated environment, because frameworks keep asking for exactly what Secure IT adds: the 24/7 SOC, security log collection and analysis (SIEM), with the retention period in your service order, and security awareness training. Framework work then carries a published uplift on the per-⁠user plan and per-⁠server management fee, because documentation, evidence collection and up to 8 hours a year for your auditor’s questions and meetings are real recurring hours. The uplifts: +10% for FTC Safeguards, DOL, IRS WISP and ALTA programs, +10% for PCI DSS, +10% for law-⁠firm confidentiality, +15% for HIPAA, +20% for SOC 2 readiness, +20% for SEC Regulation S-⁠P, +25% for CMMC — so $275 to $312.50 per user per month on Secure IT. One-⁠time work such as a gap assessment is quoted in writing before it starts.

Because the frameworks overlap far more than their acronyms suggest. Our assessment methodology is built on NIST CSF 2.0, and CSF 2.0 ships with a searchable catalog of informative references that cross-⁠maps its guidance to dozens of other standards. When the assessment finds a gap — say, no MFA on remote access — that one finding translates into NIST 800-⁠171 language for a defense supplier, DOL best-⁠practice language for a TPA, or ALTA Pillar 3 language for an escrow office.

The SOC 1 & SOC 2 Type II attestations, ISO 27001 and PCI-⁠DSS certifications, and a concurrently maintainable design belong to the datacenter facility where our private cloud and backup infrastructure live — not to CRC Cloud the company, and we are careful about that distinction. What we bring is controls and evidence: documented, monitored, tested IT that holds up when your auditor or customer asks.

Alongside them, gladly. Consultants, auditors, and counsel define what must be true; we make it true in the infrastructure and keep it true — identity, endpoints, monitoring, backup, patching, and the documentation trail. If you have internal IT, our co-⁠managed model splits those duties cleanly.

The way every CRC Cloud engagement starts: a free 30-⁠minute assessment call. The methodology behind it is NIST CSF-⁠based — Assess, Analyze, Roadmap, Execute, and Re-⁠assess, with a full assessment every year (or twice a year or quarterly if you choose) — so the first conversation already speaks the language your framework maps back to.