The Department of Defense (DoD) will require some contracts and grants to adhere to its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Level 2 protections for managing controlled unclassified information. 

To ensure that University of Iowa researchers can pursue these opportunities, Information Technology Services and the Office of the Vice President for Research will launch a secure research environment called HawkTrust-SRE in November. As a result, individual research teams will not need to independently design and certify their own compliant environments. 

HawkTrust-SRE will be a cloud-based, secure, isolated research environment. To meet the strict federal security and compliance requirements, it is being built using specialized cloud environments operated by Microsoft for organizations working with sensitive government information.  

Additional information about onboarding, training, access requirements, and project milestones will be shared as the project progresses.