How Lucid helps government agencies and contractors meet compliance requirements

As security becomes an ever-growing focus for the public sector, so do compliance requirements. 

One critical step contractors and agencies can take now to prepare for mandated compliance, including FedRAMP and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program, is to ensure the tools they use for collaboration, productivity, and advancing key initiatives are secure. Compliance readiness is complex and takes time, so it’s important to secure your tech stack as soon as possible.

Lucid can simplify the process by helping public sector teams consolidate and modernize their tech stack with a FedRAMP Authorized work acceleration platform that meets compliance requirements. It’s a win-win for teams looking to modernize and secure their tech stacks. 

In this post, we’ll detail why federal contractors and agencies trust Lucid to power their collaboration needs, make their operations more efficient, and serve as a key part of their compliance-readiness approach. 

Why Lucid is critical to federal contractors’ and agencies’ tech stacks

To truly improve mission delivery, the public sector needs a modern, efficient way to work together. Lucid GovSuite combines intelligent diagramming and virtual whiteboarding in a single, FedRAMP Authorized platform to give public sector teams a central collaboration hub for all planning, decision-making, process documentation, and diagramming.

With Lucid, you can:

• Consolidate your tech stack by replacing multiple legacy tools, like Microsoft Visio, with a modern platform. With Lucid, teams can collaborate seamlessly across the entire project life cycle—from idea to execution. 

• Collaborate in real time with intuitive and powerful features. Instead of passing static documents back and forth, Lucid allows teams to collaborate on the same document, eliminating versioning issues and enabling faster decisions. 

• Stay aligned with a single source of truth. With Lucid, teams can easily update and centralize critical documentation, including project plans, process maps, and more.

• Save time and improve efficiency through integrations with industry-leading platforms, including a bi-directional data sync with Jira and embedded links in Confluence. 

"The time difference using the Jira integration with Lucid in place of manual creation is probably 95% faster.”

—Agile contractor for a federal agency

Legacy collaboration tools—such as Visio—slow teams down with outdated and limited features, meaning teams need multiple tools to collaborate on projects. These hidden costs—wasted time, productivity, and resources—can really add up, especially when there’s pressure to do more with less. 

Lucid, on the other hand, acts as a cost-effective solution by helping public sector teams improve inefficient processes, make decisions faster, and replace multiple tools. For this reason, Lucid has been pivotal to many teams’ modernization and digital transformation efforts. 

How Lucid supports public sector compliance readiness

Compliance mandates such as CMMC focus on the maturity of cybersecurity practices across various domains, including access control, incident response, and risk management. Let’s dive into how Lucid GovSuite meets these requirements.

Gives assurance that the collaboration environment is secure

You can trust that whenever you collaborate in Lucid, your data is secure. That’s because Lucid:

• Is FedRAMP Authorized at the Moderate security impact level.
• Is a U.S. citizen-managed service built on AWS GovCloud infrastructure.
• Complies with NIST CSF, NIST 800-53 R5, NIST SP 800-171 r2, FIPS 140-2, DFARS 252.204-7012, and CMMC 2.0.
• Is used by U.S. DoD agencies and contractors for defense, ITAR, and other controlled information.

Lucid’s secure platform was pivotal to a rapidly scaling defense contractor when their scope expanded and data requirements suddenly shifted. The contractor needed a way to innovate faster while ensuring their tech stack was FedRAMP compliant. Given the increased sensitivity of their data, engineering teams were spending a lot of time working with legal to ensure they weren’t unintentionally introducing risk. 

With Lucid GovSuite’s stringent controls, this concern was completely eliminated, and the engineering teams could confidently focus on their work. As a result, the contractor was able to mitigate compliance risk while improving collaboration and saving time among their fully remote and hybrid teams.

Provides tools to properly categorize and share data within Lucid

The only way you can ensure a document is protected to your level of security requirements is to have it owned by your account. When you create documents in your Lucid GovSuite account, you have the assurance that these documents are safeguarded to the level your organization needs.

Lucid's platform provides security and compliance, but public sector teams that require specialized data protection can get an additional layer of control with Lucid's Enterprise Shield security add-on.

With Enterprise Shield, admins receive an even more granular level of control and can: 

• Prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data, including CUI (controlled unclassified information), by classifying documents with custom configurations that have corresponding actions. 
• Use content inspection to continuously scan an account’s Lucid documents for sensitive data, then take bulk actions to revoke external shares of select documents.
• Streamline data governance with content life cycle management, in which admins can preserve documents for legal holds and set rules for document retention.

For example, one highly regulated aerospace and defense contractor added Enterprise Shield to their account to gain an extra layer of security and visibility. With Lucid’s Enterprise Shield add-on, this organization will be able to classify its documents and gain additional peace of mind, knowing it can control who has access to sensitive data. 

Offers best-in-class migration and implementation services

Getting compliance-ready is a complex process, but the transition to Lucid’s secure, consolidated platform doesn’t have to be. Lucid has experienced change management and implementation professionals to guide the onboarding process and simplify the transition every step of the way.

Lucid’s professional services help streamline the transition by:

• Offering white glove and self-serve options for migrating documents from Visio or other applications. 
• Providing consulting services and extensive user training to increase time-to-value with Lucid.
• Creating custom templates to help modernize processes.

For example, a contractor for a federal health agency was migrating from a competitor to Lucid because they needed a secure, efficient solution for PI planning. Before Lucid, their PI planning process included manually transcribing sticky notes from Lucid into Jira. Lucid’s team of experts constructed a new and improved experience that leveraged Lucid's bidirectional Jira integration sync, powerful features to automatically calculate capacity, and more intelligent capabilities that took their agile practices to the next level. 

Lucid’s professional services team then conducted multiple training sessions to ensure the company felt confident running its PI planning sessions. Lucid’s team was on call as the company ran its first sessions in case they needed live support. Not only does this company now have better and more secure collaborative experiences, but it was able to reduce time to value with the help of Lucid’s professional experts. 

With Lucid, you can accelerate modernization initiatives while keeping data secure and compliant. For countless federal agencies and contractors alike, Lucid is the trusted solution for collaborating at every stage of work.