The smallest surface on the ship is the one that steers it.
A trim tab is a strip of metal no wider than your hand, hinged to the back of a rudder. It's the reason a ship the size of a city block can be turned with almost no effort. It's also how we think compliance should work.
A small correction, in exactly the right place.
Turning a large ship's rudder directly takes enormous force, because the water pushes back. So engineers added a much smaller rudder to the rudder's trailing edge.
- The trim tab moves a few degrees. It's small, so this takes very little effort.
- Water flowing past it pushes the rudder the other way. The ocean does the heavy lifting.
- The rudder turns the ship. A tiny adjustment changes the course of the whole vessel.
“Call me Trimtab.”
Fuller used the trim tab as his favorite metaphor for how one person, applying a small effort at exactly the right point, can turn something enormous. He liked it so much that he asked for those three words on his gravestone.
Compliance is a very big ship.
CMMC Level 2 alone is 110 requirements. Behind them sit hundreds of settings, spread across every laptop, server, and cloud tenant, changing every week. Most teams try to turn the whole ship at once: a spreadsheet sprint before an assessment, then months of drift until the next one.
Trimtab is our trim tab for that ship. It finds the handful of settings that matter on each device and tenant, explains each one in plain English, shows exactly how to correct it, and keeps watch so nothing quietly drifts back. Small corrections, made continuously, keep the whole fleet on course.
Five principles we hold our heading by.
Small corrections, often
Daily checks and drift alerts beat annual fire drills. A fix made today is cheaper than a finding made later.
Plain English
Every requirement comes with what it means in everyday words, next to the official text and a link to the source.
Proof, not promises
Every result shows the evidence behind it, so you can hand an assessor facts instead of assurances.
Honest about the horizon
Technical checks can't prove policies, training, or physical security. We say exactly what we cover and what's still on you.
Secure by design
A compliance tool shouldn't be a new risk. Lookout is read-only, credentials are per device, and every sign-in needs MFA.
Ready to set a steadier course?
Trimtab is almost ready to leave the harbor. Sign up and we'll signal you the moment it does.