Blog Post

For many manufacturers, CMMC is now part of the contract. That’s because the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program is now enforceable under the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), placing specific cybersecurity requirements directly into defense contracts and the subcontracts beneath them.

For large prime contractors with in-house security teams, the change was expected. For the small and mid-sized businesses that make up much of the defense supply chain, CMMC is catching many off guard.

If your company builds, services, ships, designs, or supplies anything connected to a federal defense contract, CMMC may already apply to you, even if you have never worked directly with the Department of Defense.

CMMC is Not Just a “Big Contractor” Problem

Under the CMMC program, prime contractors are responsible for ensuring that subcontractors handling controlled information meet the required CMMC level before work is awarded and before sensitive data is shared.

That means a machine shop, engineering firm, logistics provider, IT company, or specialty manufacturer several tiers removed from the Department of Defense may still be required to meet the same cybersecurity standards as the prime contractor. The Department of Defense estimates that roughly 220,000 companies make up the Defense Industrial Base, with small and mid-sized businesses accounting for the majority.

For many of these businesses, CMMC is becoming a prerequisite for keeping existing defense work and competing for future contracts. Federal cybersecurity requirements are no longer limited to the largest contractors. They increasingly apply to the companies that support them.

The Three Levels to CMMC

CMMC sorts requirements into three levels based on the sensitivity of the information you handle:

• Level 1 (Foundational) applies to companies that handle Federal Contract Information (FCI). It covers basic cyber hygiene and is verified through an annual self-assessment.
• Level 2 (Advanced) applies to companies that handle Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). It is built on the 110 security requirements in NIST SP 800-171, and for many contracts it must be verified by an independent, third-party assessor.
• Level 3 (Expert) applies to the most sensitive programs and adds further controls assessed by the government directly.

Most subcontractors that handle CUI — technical drawings, engineering specs, project data — land at Level 2. That is where the requirements get real, because they often require outside verification rather than a self-attestation.

Meeting the CMMC Deadline

CMMC is rolling out in phases. Phase 1 began on the November 2025 effective date, with requirements appearing selectively in new contracts. Phase 2 begins November 10, 2026, the point at which the Department of Defense can start requiring third-party Level 2 certification as a condition of award on applicable CUI contracts. You can track the official rollout on the Department of Defense’s CMMC program page.

Here is the part that creates urgency without any hype: a Level 2 third-party assessment commonly takes six to twelve months to prepare for and complete. Phase 2 is months away, not years. For any company that expects a Level 2 requirement on a contract it wants to keep or win, the practical runway to get ready has already narrowed.

There is also a real cost to getting it wrong. CMMC requires an annual affirmation of compliance, and a knowingly false affirmation can expose a company to liability under the federal False Claims Act. This is not a requirement to guess on.

What Businesses Should be Paying Attention To

Georgia sits in the middle of the defense economy — aerospace manufacturing, military installations, and a deep bench of suppliers and subcontractors that support them. Many of those suppliers are exactly the kind of mid-sized construction, manufacturing, and professional-services firms that have never thought of themselves as “defense contractors,” yet now handle FCI or CUI through a prime relationship.

If that describes your business, the questions worth asking internally are straightforward. Do any of our contracts involve federal or defense work? Do we receive drawings, specifications, or data that could be CUI? Has a customer started asking about our SPRS score or CMMC status? A “yes” to any of these means CMMC belongs on your radar now.

How to Get Started

You do not have to solve CMMC all at once, and you cannot self-certify your way out of a Level 2 requirement. The most useful first move is a readiness assessment: identify which CMMC level applies to you, map your current systems against the required controls, and document where the gaps are. From there, the work becomes a plan rather than a scramble — implementing the missing controls, building the required System Security Plan, and standing up the ongoing monitoring the standard expects.

The controls themselves are not exotic. As we cover in our breakdown of cybersecurity services, most of them — access control, multifactor authentication, monitoring, incident response — are the same protections that reduce your actual breach risk. CMMC simply requires that you implement them deliberately, document them, and keep them running. The controls in our security and data protection approach map closely to what an assessor will look for.

Working with Eclipse Networks on CMMC

Eclipse Networks helps small and mid-sized businesses get assessment-ready and stay that way. That means evaluating your environment against the required CMMC level, closing the gaps, documenting your security posture, and managing the controls on an ongoing basis so compliance holds up between assessments. We are not a certifying body — the formal certification is performed by an accredited third-party assessor — but getting you to the point where you can pass that assessment, and stay compliant afterward, is exactly the kind of work we do every day.

If CMMC has landed on your radar, or a customer has started asking questions you are not sure how to answer, contact Eclipse Networks at (770) 399-9099 or reach out through our site for a readiness conversation. The earlier you start, the more options you have.