Nucleus Security announced Nucleus POAM Process Automation, a comprehensive solution for federal agencies and their vendors to streamline risk management and automate their Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) process.
This solution overcomes error-prone and labor-intensive manual processes by automating repetitive POA&M workflows with real-time tracking and reporting, ensuring that compliance and risk management efforts are efficient and accurate.
“Federal agencies and their suppliers must adapt to increasing compliance requirements while maintaining a strong security posture,” commented Steve Carter, CEO at Nucleus Security. “However, as current POA&M reporting requires time-intensive, manual data entry, security officers cannot focus their efforts where it counts most – on mitigating security risks. Nucleus POAM Process Automation offers an integrated, scalable solution to manage POA&Ms with precision, accuracy, and minimal overhead, freeing up valuable resources to address security vulnerabilities rather than reporting them.”
All U.S. federal government agencies, defense contractors and subcontractors, and cloud service providers must comply with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Management Framework (RMF) to manage risks and maintain security controls across their information systems. Existing POA&M management tools focus on generating reports and ignore the underlying risk management needs, leaving significant manual work for security and compliance teams.
Integrated with Nucleus’s Unified Vulnerability Management Platform, Nucleus POAM Process Automation addresses these challenges and more. By automating the triggers, processing, and reporting of POA&M data, this solution helps federal agencies and their contractors maintain compliance, reduce operational overhead, and focus on mitigating actual security risks rather than just reporting.
Key Features of Nucleus POAM Process Automation include:
- Centralized solution with Hierarchical Access Control: Nucleus provides centralized vulnerability management across all systems, with precise access control tailored to organizational hierarchies ensuring users only see what they are permitted to, reinforcing data security and operational governance.
- Automated SLA Assignment: The platform automatically sets Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on regulatory standards, such as those from CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog. This ensures that critical vulnerabilities are remediated within 15 days and high-risk ones within 30 days.
- Automatic POAM Triggering: Nucleus automates the creation of POA&M entries when SLAs are missed, ensuring that any non-compliance is tracked and actioned without manual intervention. This allows security teams to focus on mitigation instead of administration.
- Integrated Milestone Planning: The solution embeds milestones and corrective actions directly into the vulnerability management workflow, enabling teams to map out remediation plans, assign resources, and track progress in a single platform.
- Continuous Monitoring (ConMon): Nucleus automatically generates scheduled POA&M reports and populates ConMon fields, keeping agencies’ compliance posture up-to-date without manual updates. This approach aligns with NIST 800-171 and FedRAMP ConMon requirements.
- Built-in Evidence Collection: Collects and attaches relevant evidence, such as vulnerability scans, to POA&M entries, reducing administrative overhead and improving audit readiness.
By automating key processes such as SLA enforcement, POA&M entry creation, and report generation, Nucleus enables public sector organizations and vendors to maintain compliance and reduce risk with greater efficiency and accuracy.
“To remain effective while also being efficient and compliant, government agencies need to embrace new solutions that automate time-consuming, manual processes.” said Dcode Capital managing partner and CIA veteran Rebecca Gevalt. “Nucleus POAM Process Automation provides accurate and reliable POAM management supported by comprehensive vulnerability management to help federal agencies and their partners achieve faster, more reliable compliance.”