October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a time dedicated to reflecting on our digital defenses. But for organizations managing risk at the scale of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), reflection isn’t enough—action is mandatory. That’s why the DoD’s recent pivot from the complex Risk Management Framework (RMF) to the new Cybersecurity Risk Management Construct (CSRMC) is one of the most significant shifts in threat management at the federal level in the history of cyber security and information assurance. While still being defined, this change heralds a new risk management paradigm, one that promises speed and efficiency by streamlining and empowering risk assessments.
RMF was officially mandated by the DoD in 2014 to replace an older process for managing cybersecurity risk across the organization. While the goal was to apply a common language and methodology to all information technology for standardization, alignment with federal standards, and end-to-end security, the promise of integrating with the system development life cycle (SDLC) was never fully realized due to RMF’s burdensome control process.
IntelliDyne cybersecurity expert Nik Tressler describes RMF as a “big idea to account for every possible vulnerability, like a complete suit of armor,” but one that was ultimately crippled by its own complexity and slowness. “Imagine experts aiming to create the safest race car ever, but after considering so many possible problems, they’ve only secured the front half of the car by the time the production deadline arrives,” he explains. “The granularity of the legacy process forced an untenable choice: either double the time to complete the safety process or put the car on the track with vulnerabilities.” In all its ambition, RMF became a bottleneck to threat protection, slowing operations and innovation while allowing security problems to pile up in the system like chinks in that safety armor. The CSRMC is more than just a new acronym; it represents a philosophical and practical reboot. Tressler says the shift “puts heart back into the mission. It’s a change in both thinking and process, reflecting a renewed effort to up our game—and a call to tackle threat protection with renewed vigor.”
Addressing the Pain Points of RMF
CSRMC aims to resolve the slowness and complexity that burdened RMF by achieving greater risk management efficiency in two primary ways: streamlining the process and shifting priorities. The construct doesn’t reinvent the core concepts of risk management. It reprioritizes and reorganizes them to gain crucial speed.
1. Streamlining Process: The new construct envisions a ‘fast start’ by combining the old RMF steps 1–3 into a single initial phase, allowing the process to get to the later phases much quicker. This helps preserve momentum, which is a key priority for the new administration.
2. Strategic Prioritization: The CSRMC establishes 10 tenets to provide clear guidance on what objectives should be prioritized, ensuring resources are aligned to where they matter most.
Of the 10 tenets, two of them highlight this strategic shift:
- Tenet #2: Critical Controls. The old RMF sought to account for every possible risk. The CSRMC acknowledges that some risks are theoretical and directs focus where the enemy is actually attacking. As Tressler puts it, the CSRMC ensures “the effort going into securing an environment correlates to the actual kinds of risks a system has to deal with.”
- Tenet #9: Reciprocity. To combat resource-draining duplication, the CSRMC seeks to establish simple reciprocity for authorization across the DoD, meaning components can authorize a system once and broadly share that approval. “It will be a big win if the CSRMC can establish this across the DoD” says Tressler.
Automation and the Path Forward
The CSRMC transition is a massive undertaking for the DoD. The full implementation timeline is still being established but may align to the department’s goal of achieving Zero Trust (ZT) by the end of FY2027. The CSRMC serves as the procedural mechanism designed to accelerate the DoD’s implementation of continuous monitoring and authorization. It is essentially the efficiency boost needed to handle the massive volume of real-time security data and control assessments required to maintain a ZT architecture.
Essential to the success of CSRMC is Tenet #1: Automation. This is where innovative solutions like IntelliDyne’s RiskForce Orchestrator can be a game-changer. RiskForce Orchestrator unifies the many tools and processes behind risk management into a single, cohesive system, streamlining collaboration and accelerating decision-making. As Tressler explains, it’s like “having everyone in the same room, bringing together all the players to move business along,” eliminating roadblocks that slow progress.
The CSRMC is the DoD’s answer to modern cyber threats—a decisive shift in priority and commitment to moving faster, smarter, and with a renewed focus on what truly matters. Without this streamlined risk process, verifying continuous access controls would—and did—quickly become administratively impossible. By simplifying complexity, the CSRMC and supporting technology like RiskForce Orchestrator will accelerate business and even encourage new talent to enter the field.
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