The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is a third-party assessment program created by the DoD to gauge the maturity of an organization's cybersecurity practices and verify the protection of Federal Contract Information (FCI) as well as Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). When CMMC 1.0 was released in 2017, there were concerns amongst government contractors as it was incredibly pricey for small organizations, contained vague language of CMMC assessment process, and did not include a lot of overlap in cybersecurity requirements to other federal requirements or commonly accepted standards.