What is Certification Assistant?
Certification Assistant helps your organization build and maintain a System Security Plan (SSP) and manage a Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) for NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC compliance. Exostar hosts Certification Assistant, and it is available as an application on your organization’s Managed Access Gateway (MAG) account. Each assessment requires a separately obtained license.
Certification Assistant organizes your work around individual control IDs (for example, 3.1.1). For each control, you record how the control is implemented, attach supporting evidence, and track your review progress. When you have a gap, you create a POA&M item to track remediation.
Certification Assistant is actively maintained and supported. It is a separate application from PolicyPro, so PolicyPro credentials do not grant access to Certification Assistant.
Click here for the latest release notes – Certification Assistant Release Notes 1.1
Certification Assistant Roles
CA Owner Admin: Automatically assigned to the first user who logs in to Certification Assistant for an organization. Can create assessments, bind license keys, and manage other users’ roles.
User: Assigned to every subsequent user by default. Cannot create assessments or bind license keys. Contact your CA Owner Admin for a role change.
NOTE: This is your organization-level role. It is separate from the assessment-level permissions (Admin, Read/Write, Read-Only) described under Managing Assessment Users below, which control what a specific user can do within one specific assessment.