NIST 171 Compliance

Compliance with NIST 171 is becoming mandatory in critical nonfederal sectors such as institutions of higher education and federal government contractors. As an organization with access to controlled unclassified information (CUI), you must comply with NIST 171 IT security standards introduced in 2016 and updated in 2018. The publication details basic and derived security requirements necessary to protect CUI confidentiality in nonfederal systems. 171 compliance requirements for Higher Education are following suit. Ward IT Security Consulting Group can help your college, university, or other organizations meet the required security standards. We have extensive experience in designing cost-effective NIST 171 assessments and compliance frameworks specifically for Higher Education.

Meeting NIST 171 Standards

The Ward Group can assist your organization in understanding the impact of NIST 171 guidelines. Compliance with these standards is imperative when your IT systems process, store, or transmit contractually-defined CUI. We ensure compliance with updated requirements based on 109 controls and 14 CUI Security Requirement Families. We assist you with these tasks and others:

Security requirement assessments following NIST 800-171A guidelines
System security plan development
Implementation of security solutions or “acceptable alternatives”
CUI security inclusion in your risk management process
Compliance documentation to government entities

Why We’re Best In Class

Ward IT Security Group has a combined 75 years of experience in implementing and managing IT security. Our IT experts have a successful NIST 171 compliance performance history with colleges, universities and other major organizations. We have the expertise and depth of understanding to help you meet complex compliance guidelines.

Our Collaborative Approach

Ward Consulting is a small group of dedicated American professionals. We are best-of-breed specialists who shun canned big-business solutions and value working as a team. Together, we developed a collaborative approach that includes your IT management and business process owners on our evaluation team. We believe information is critical to any IT assessment. That’s why we begin each evaluation by working to understand your business processes. Our team doesn’t perform audits that simply assign a pass/fail grade. Any IT system evaluation we perform includes a significant knowledge transfer from us to your organization. When we present our findings, we provide evidence and NIST references. If we uncover any threats, we rate them in a way that allows you to choose remediation alternatives based on critical need.