Stehrling Continuous Compliance. Ongoing program ownership between assessments, when CUI flows shift, vendors change, environments evolve, and the next regulatory framework lands. Built for organizations that intend to stay certified, not just achieve certification once.
CMMC certifications are valid for three years. What happens between the day you certify and the day you recertify is where compliance posture is built or lost. Without ongoing program ownership, the same pattern repeats across the DIB.
You just certified. Documentation is fresh. Controls are configured exactly as the SSP describes. The team remembers the assessment. Posture is strong. Everyone moves on to other priorities.
New vendors are onboarded without compliance review. CUI flows change as contracts evolve. Configurations drift as IT teams optimize for operations. The SSP becomes a document nobody updates. No one notices because no one is looking.
Recertification approaches. The team scrambles to reconcile what's documented with what's actually deployed. POA&Ms have grown stale. New regulatory requirements landed and weren't addressed. The cost of recertification is two to three times what it should have been.
Organizations that maintain posture between assessments recertify smoothly and predictably. Organizations that drift recertify expensively, sometimes urgently, and occasionally with findings that put contracts at risk. The difference isn't talent or budget. It's whether someone owned the program between assessments.
Stehrling Continuous Compliance is a recurring engagement that maintains your compliance posture across the three-year certification cycle. Not a retainer for ad hoc questions. Not a monitoring tool. A structured program with defined deliverables, named practitioners, and clear ownership of the work that keeps your certification defensible.
Continuous Compliance addresses the work that doesn't fit anywhere else. It's beyond what an MSP delivers, because MSPs manage infrastructure, not compliance programs. It's beyond what a GRC platform provides, because platforms record posture, they don't maintain it. It's beyond what internal IT can absorb, because compliance program management requires expertise most IT teams reasonably don't have.
Continuous Compliance is what stays after certification, owning the program so your team doesn't have to.
"Certification is a milestone, not a destination. Continuous Compliance is how we stay with you for the journey."
Every Continuous Compliance engagement includes the same core deliverables. Scope and depth scale to your organizational complexity, but the program structure is consistent.
Your System Security Plan, policies, and procedures are reviewed every quarter against your actual environment. Drift is identified and remediated before it becomes a finding.
Active management of your Plan of Action and Milestones. New gaps documented, remediation tracked, closed items validated, and the entire POA&M kept current and audit-ready.
NIST 800-171 Rev 3 transition. CMMC reciprocity decisions. Framework updates. We monitor the regulatory landscape and translate changes into specific actions for your program.
New vendors, new services, environment changes, organizational restructuring. Every change with potential compliance impact is reviewed before it disrupts your posture.
Annual training refreshes, role-based training updates, and ongoing CUI handling awareness for your workforce. Training material updated as your environment evolves.
Beginning 12 months before your recertification window, preparation work intensifies. Mock assessments, evidence refreshes, documentation updates. Recertification becomes a planned event, not a fire drill.
When contract scope changes, when a customer asks a compliance question, when a vendor proposes something that might affect your posture, your team has direct access to senior practitioners.
A standing quarterly readout to your leadership team. Posture status, regulatory changes, upcoming work, and the strategic view of where your compliance program is heading.
Every Continuous Compliance engagement includes the same core deliverables. What changes is scope, depth, and cadence, calibrated to the effort your environment actually requires. We don't sell tiers off a menu. We scope the work to your situation, and we price it accordingly.
The right scope emerges from understanding your environment, not from selecting a tier. A single-environment manufacturer with stable operations engages differently than a multi-environment international firm in active growth. A newly certified contractor with a strong internal team needs different oversight than one without compliance staff. The methodology is consistent. The scope is yours.
The scoping conversation happens during discovery, where we walk through your environment, contract obligations, change velocity, and the level of program ownership that fits your organization. We come out of that conversation with a defined engagement, a clear cadence, and pricing grounded in the actual effort the work will require.
No two Continuous Compliance engagements are identical, because no two compliance programs are identical. What's consistent is the discipline we bring to scoping them.
Continuous Compliance engagements operate against a predictable rhythm. Some work happens every quarter regardless of conditions. Some work intensifies as recertification approaches. The cadence keeps your program ahead of the cycle, not behind it.
Standing cadence with your compliance lead. Issues addressed, change impacts reviewed, upcoming work scoped. The working layer of the engagement.
Comprehensive review of SSP, POA&M, training status, regulatory landscape, and posture against the certification baseline. Findings, recommendations, and remediation plans.
Full annual refresh of training material, policy reviews, evidence collection, and risk register updates. Sets the program up for the year ahead.
Beginning 12 months before recertification, work intensifies. Mock assessment, evidence packaging, documentation finalization. Recertification becomes a planned milestone, executed with confidence.
Most compliance firms structure their business around getting clients certified, not keeping them there. The team that builds your program isn't the team that maintains it. Knowledge gets handed off, context gets lost, and your second-year compliance work feels like starting over with a vendor who doesn't remember the decisions made in year one.
Stehrling is built differently. The same practitioners who guide your CMMC Readiness engagement transition into your Continuous Compliance engagement. The CCA who validated your readiness knows the architectural decisions behind your CUI boundary. The practitioner who wrote your SSP understands the policies they authored. Continuity is the entire point.
This is also why our clients pass recertification cleanly. Continuous Compliance isn't a separate practice we layered on top of certification work. It's how we keep certified clients certified, and we've structured the firm around making that the natural progression of every engagement.
Whether you're 30 days past certification or 18 months in and noticing drift, Continuous Compliance is built to meet you where you are. Talk to a practitioner about your current posture and what ongoing program ownership would look like for your organization.
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An independent firm focused exclusively on CMMC compliance for defense contractors and the DIB.