By Jennifer M. Ellett – October-December 2011
Certification and accreditation (C&A) transformation is an initiative to align processes, terminology and frameworks for assessing information security risk across all federal agencies, including the defense and intelligence communities. This effort will provide efficiencies, standardization and support to reciprocity.

Reciprocity is an agreement among participating entities to accept each other’s security assessment to reuse information security resources and accept each other’s assessment and security posture to share information. This reduces rework and cycle time when deploying and receiving information systems from outside a single Department of Defense (DoD) component. Reciprocity between DoD components is based on transparency, uniform processes and a common understanding of expected outcomes.

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