Gap Assessment
A full NIST 800-171 gap assessment against all 110 controls, mapped to your actual environment — so you know exactly where you stand and what stands between you and your required SPRS score.
CMMC Compliance & NIST 800-171 for Defense Contractors
If your business holds DoD contracts — or wants to — CMMC is no longer optional, and your competitors are getting ready. Ghosxt prepares small defense contractors and subcontractors on the Central Coast for CMMC and NIST SP 800-171, led by a cleared DoD IT engineer who has lived inside these exact controls. Not a generic checklist from a vendor who has never handled CUI — readiness built by someone who has.
Built by a cleared DoD engineer — not a checklist from someone who has never touched CUI.
What CMMC is, and who it's for
The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is the Department of Defense's framework for verifying that contractors protect the information they are trusted with. It builds on NIST SP 800-171 and applies to the entire defense industrial base — not just the primes, but the machine shops, engineering firms, manufacturers, and service providers in their supply chains. If your contracts carry DFARS 252.204-7012, or a prime has started asking about your security posture, this affects you.
The hard truth for small businesses is that CUI does not care how small you are. A two-person subcontractor that handles controlled drawings is in scope, and being out of compliance increasingly means losing the contract to someone who is in compliance.
Why a cleared DoD engineer is different here
Most IT shops approaching CMMC are learning it from a binder. Ghosxt is run by a cleared DoD IT engineer and former Senior Solutions Consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense — someone who has implemented and operated these controls inside the environments they were written for. That means the difference between a paper SSP that falls apart under questioning and documentation that reflects a system genuinely built to standard.
It also means realism. We design the smallest defensible scope, implement what the controls actually require, and tell you plainly what is and is not done — the same discipline expected inside a real accreditation boundary.
How we get you CMMC-ready
A scoped, practical path from wherever you are now to assessment-ready — without securing your entire company to a level only your CUI needs.
CUI Enclave Design
We scope CUI into a small, hardened enclave instead of securing your whole company to Level 2. Less scope means lower cost, faster readiness, and an assessment that is genuinely passable.
SSP & POA&M
The System Security Plan and Plan of Action and Milestones that contracts and assessors demand — written to match how your systems are really configured, and maintainable as things change.
Control Implementation
Access control, MFA, encryption, audit logging, incident response, and the rest of the 110 controls actually deployed and hardened — by an engineer who ran these controls inside real DoD networks.
SPRS Score & Submission
We calculate your NIST 800-171 self-assessment score and help you submit it to SPRS correctly, so your eligibility is on record where contracting officers and primes check.
Ongoing Compliance
CMMC is not one-and-done. Continuous monitoring, patching, and evidence collection keep you assessment-ready year over year, folded into managed IT so it is maintained, not left to drift.
Find out exactly what CMMC will take for your business
Book a free assessment. We will scope which level your contracts require, where your gaps are, and what a realistic, lowest-cost path to readiness looks like — in plain language, whether or not you hire us.
Book your free assessmentWe document for the assessor, not the checkbox
The fastest way to fail a CMMC assessment is documentation that does not match reality — an SSP that claims controls you never implemented, or a POA&M that has not moved in a year. We build the other way: implement the control, then document what is actually there, so when an assessor or a prime asks how something works, the answer is in the record and true. That is also how we approach C-TPAT and every other framework — controls first, paperwork that matches.
CMMC readiness pairs naturally with our cybersecurity and manufacturing and engineering IT work, since most defense subs on the Central Coast are exactly those kinds of shops.
CMMC & NIST 800-171 FAQs
Who actually needs CMMC?
Any business in the defense supply chain that handles federal contract information (FCI) or controlled unclassified information (CUI) — prime contractors and, increasingly, their subcontractors. If your DoD contracts include DFARS clause 252.204-7012, CMMC is coming for you. Level 1 covers FCI; Level 2 covers CUI and maps to the 110 controls of NIST SP 800-171.
What's the difference between CMMC Level 1 and Level 2?
Level 1 is 17 basic safeguarding practices for FCI, met with an annual self-assessment. Level 2 is the full 110 controls of NIST 800-171 for CUI, and for most contracts requires a third-party (C3PAO) assessment every three years. We determine which applies to your contracts before doing anything else, so you are not over- or under-building.
We're just a subcontractor — do we still need it?
Very likely yes. Primes are required to flow CMMC requirements down to subcontractors who touch FCI or CUI. Many small subs are now being told by their prime that they need to show compliance to keep the work. Getting ahead of that is how you keep contracts instead of losing them to a compliant competitor.
Can you get us a SPRS score and write our SSP and POA&M?
Yes. We perform the NIST 800-171 self-assessment, calculate and help you submit your SPRS score, and produce the System Security Plan (SSP) and Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) that contracts and assessors require — real documentation that matches how your systems are actually configured, not a generic template.
Do you perform the official CMMC assessment?
No — the formal Level 2 certification is performed by an accredited C3PAO, and a credible provider should not both prepare you and certify you. What we do is everything that gets you ready to pass: gap assessment, remediation, control implementation, and documentation, so the assessment is a confirmation, not a gamble.
How long does CMMC readiness take?
It depends on your starting point and scope, but a focused small-business effort is typically a few months. The fastest path is to reduce scope — isolating CUI to a small, well-controlled enclave rather than securing your entire environment to the same level. We design for that from day one.
Protect your defense contracts before the deadline does
Book a free CMMC assessment, or call (831) 204-0501. The earlier you start, the cheaper and calmer readiness is — and the less likely a compliance gap costs you a contract.
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