ATO Readiness for SMBs in 30 Days: Evidence-First Delivery

The 30‑day ATO-readiness sequence

Most teams fail ATO readiness because they treat compliance as a late-stage document sprint. The faster path is to design your delivery so evidence is produced automatically as work ships. This outline is built for lean SMB teams supporting regulated customers—enough structure to satisfy oversight without slowing engineering.

Days 1–7: Define the boundary and the “show your work” plan

• System boundary: what’s in-scope, what’s out, and where data enters/leaves (a simple diagram is fine).
• Control ownership map: who owns which controls (cloud platform vs app team vs security vs vendor).
• Evidence map: for each control family, list the artifact that will prove it (logs, tickets, pipeline reports, configs).
• Risk register starter: 10–15 real risks with owners and mitigations; don’t wait for “perfect”.

Days 8–14: Build the minimum secure foundation

• Identity first: MFA everywhere, least-privilege roles, break-glass access with monitoring.
• Logging baseline: centralize CloudTrail/Config/VPC Flow and retain long enough to satisfy oversight.
• Network guardrails: segmentation, egress control, and security group standards.
• Patch + vuln cadence: pick a rhythm you can keep (weekly is better than “someday”).

Days 15–23: Make DevSecOps generate evidence

Pick gates that are easy to explain and hard to bypass:

• SAST + dependency scanning in CI
• IaC scanning and policy checks
• Change records tied to deployments (commit → build → deploy)
• Environment promotion approvals (who approved what, when)

Days 24–30: Prove readiness with a short validation sprint

• Tabletop DR test: run the playbook and capture screenshots/logs as evidence.
• Access review: export IAM roles/users, verify least privilege, and document exceptions.
• Audit narrative: a 2–3 page “how we operate” story beats a 60‑page pile of screenshots.

Quick checklist

• Boundary diagram + data flow
• Control ownership + evidence map
• Centralized logging + retention
• CI/CD gates + reports saved
• Incident + DR runbooks tested

Next steps

If you want, we can turn this into a scoped 2–4 week engagement with concrete deliverables (evidence map, guardrails, pipeline gates, and test artifacts).