Case Study
From 87 days to 2-5 weeks: how our CMMC delivery model was built
The engagement that founded AeoliTech's approach: a defense subcontractor days from losing its largest contract, an 87-day manual sprint to readiness, and the automation that came from doing it the hard way first.
The situation
A defense subcontractor came to us with a compliance posture that could not support its contract obligations and almost no time to fix it. The SPRS score it had affirmed did not match the controls actually implemented, documentation was template-driven rather than environment-driven, and evidence existed as scattered screenshots rather than an assessor-ready package. They were, in their own words, days away from losing their largest contract.
The 87-day engagement
We did what the industry considers fast: a manual, expert-led sprint. CUI boundary scoping, control-by-control gap analysis across all 110 NIST SP 800-171 requirements, hands-on remediation alongside their IT team, a real SSP written against the running environment, and an evidence package assembled objective by objective. It took 87 days, and it worked: the contractor reached a defensible posture and kept its eligibility.
It also proved something uncomfortable. Roughly two-thirds of those 87 days were not expertise. They were waiting: waiting for tickets to be picked up, for change windows, for screenshots to be retaken after the environment drifted, for documents to be revised after findings invalidated earlier sections. The expert work was measured in days. The calendar was consumed by manual, serial process.
The lesson that became PolicyCortex: remediation and evidence collection are the two longest phases of every CMMC engagement, and both are automatable. Automate them, run the remaining workstreams in parallel, and the 6-18 month industry timeline collapses.
What we built from it
PolicyCortex exists because of that engagement. The platform enforces NIST SP 800-171 controls continuously against AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, remediates deterministic findings in minutes with every action validated against its inverse, and generates evidence mapped to all 320 assessment objectives as a byproduct of enforcement. The delivery model around it runs scope, design, remediation, documentation, and packaging in parallel instead of series.
The result is the engagement we run today: scoped, designed, deployed, remediated, and evidence-packaged for your C3PAO in 2-5 weeks, depending on environment size. The 87-day version of this work is the slow path now.
What this means for you
If your affirmed SPRS score would not survive a review, the calendar is not your enemy; the process is. The mechanism is public in our week-by-week delivery breakdown, and the timeline for your specific environment is settled in the first week of scoping, not estimated after months of discovery.
Get your fixed timeline
A one-week scope produces a committed calendar and a fixed price. No open-ended discovery phase.