Compliance & Security Governance

Federal contracting requires more than a security checklist. It requires a documented, defensible posture that a contracting officer, assessor, or auditor can evaluate at any stage of the procurement or oversight cycle — and that your own team can actually live with after the consultants leave. Wilkes & Liberty translates the structural requirements of NIST 800-171, CMMC, and related federal standards into the specific artifacts, procedures, and institutional knowledge your organization needs to compete for and retain federal work.

The engagement produces durable deliverables: a System Security Plan mapped to your actual environment rather than a template's imagined one; a Plan of Action and Milestones with remediation timelines your engineers agree are real; CUI handling procedures calibrated to how your people actually work; and an incident response plan tested against your operational reality in facilitated tabletop exercises. Every document is authored for the audience that will read it — assessors, program offices, contracting officers — as an accurate representation of your posture, not a compliance formality.

We approach this work as preparation for scrutiny, not avoidance of it. The deliverables are designed to withstand assessment, support ATO sponsorship discussions, and serve as living documents your team maintains as the environment and contract portfolio evolve. Compliance that only a consultant can update is not a posture — it is a dependency.

What the engagement covers

• NIST 800-171 readiness assessment and remediation planning — gap analysis against all 110 controls mapped to your actual technical environment, with prioritized remediation sequencing. Your team enters assessments with documented evidence, not reactive scrambling.
• System Security Plan (SSP) authoring — system boundary definition, control implementation descriptions, responsible roles, and interconnection agreements, in the format federal assessors evaluate.
• Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) development — structured milestones with realistic timelines and resource assignments that demonstrate credible remediation intent to contracting officers.
• CUI handling procedures and data classification — end-to-end procedures for identifying, marking, handling, storing, and destroying Controlled Unclassified Information under 32 CFR Part 2002.
• Incident response planning and tabletop facilitation — IR plan development and facilitated exercises that validate procedures against realistic scenarios and satisfy federal IR documentation requirements.

Where it fits

Compliance governance is a pure practice — there is deliberately no product form, because a defensible posture cannot be installed; it has to be built into how your organization runs. It pairs naturally with the engineering practices that implement what the artifacts describe: Zero-Trust Architecture for the control families themselves, DevSecOps for supply-chain and configuration management evidence, and the AI & Sovereignty Readiness Assessment when the question is broader than one framework.