One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding CMMC compliance is that identifying Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is simply a matter of running a scan. For organizations with years of engineering data, contracts, email, SharePoint sites, network file shares, and cloud repositories, the challenge isn't finding information, it's accurately identifying which information is actually CUI.
Like many defense contractors, a large multinational defense contractor evaluated multiple approaches to identifying Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), including internally developed solutions and commercially available discovery tools. While these tools generated plenty of results, they also produced millions of potential matches.
That quickly became the real problem. Every file identified as potential CUI had to be reviewed to determine whether it actually contained controlled information. At enterprise scale, that creates an enormous manual effort that can consume significant time and resources.
With millions of documents flagged as potential CUI, the organization faced a daunting question: How could its teams realistically review and validate that volume of information? The sheer number of potential matches would require an enormous investment in personnel and time, making manual validation impractical.
For organizations managing hundreds of millions of files, even a relatively small false-positive rate can translate into months, or even years, of manual review.
The defense contractor ultimately adopted Teramis to improve the precision of its CUI discovery process, achieving over 99% accuracy and dramatically reducing the volume of files requiring manual validation.
The improvement fundamentally changed the organization's approach to CUI discovery. Instead of confronting millions of questionable results, its teams could focus their attention on a substantially smaller, more manageable set of files requiring further review.
No discovery solution completely eliminates the need for human validation. However, when false positives are dramatically reduced, manual review becomes practical instead of overwhelming. For this organization, the difference was transformative, turning what had been an unmanageable validation effort into a practical, repeatable process.
Accurate CUI discovery is about much more than preparing for an assessment. It serves as the foundation for nearly every aspect of a successful CMMC program. Organizations need confidence that they know where CUI resides so they can define an accurate compliance boundary, reduce unnecessary compliance scope, protect sensitive information appropriately, respond effectively during cyber incidents, and support ongoing compliance activities, including annual affirmations.
When discovery tools overwhelm security teams with false positives, every one of those downstream activities becomes more expensive, more time-consuming, and more difficult to defend.
Many traditional data discovery and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions were designed to detect structured data such as Social Security numbers, credit card information, or other personally identifiable information. CUI presents a fundamentally different challenge.
It often resides in engineering drawings, CAD files, technical manuals, scanned PDFs, images, manufacturing specifications, and decades of contract documentation. Much of it is inconsistently marked, or not marked at all, making it difficult for generic tools to distinguish meaningful CUI from ordinary business data.
The result is often a difficult tradeoff: either miss legitimate CUI or generate millions of false positives that require manual validation. Neither approach is practical for organizations seeking to establish and maintain CMMC compliance.
The experience of this large multinational defense contractor demonstrates that success in CUI discovery isn't measured by how many files a tool flags. It's measured by how accurately it identifies the files that actually matter.
Reducing false positives doesn't simply save time. It gives organizations confidence that they understand their CUI boundary, helps them focus their compliance efforts where they matter most, and provides a stronger foundation for achieving and maintaining CMMC compliance.
Want to see how Teramis delivers precision CUI discovery with up to 99.95% accuracy? Schedule a demo and discover what's really in your environment.