Santa Cruz Works' Business Accelerator program which is designed to serve new entrepreneurs and focuses on building a vibrant startup community in Santa Cruz County will be launching next month. Startups will have access to a variety of resources, including talented and knowledgeable mentors. CyberNINES is one of the mentors that startups will have access to in the Accelerator. CyberNINES is on the mission to bring Cybersecurity awareness, tools and best practices to small and medium business partners in the DOD supply chain.

Protecting classified business information

Written by Nick Alaga

Ever wonder how the Chinese can build fighter aircraft that look alarmingly similar to ours? The answer is controlled unclassified information, or CUI. Foreign actors, like China, are able to hack into defense contractors and sub-contractor’s systems, collect this data, and unlock access to contractors higher up the Department of Defense (DoD) supply chain.

DoD is fighting this with requirements in their purchase orders to contractors, called DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations), which stipulate cyber security measures contractors and subcontractors must have in place to safeguard CUI. These requirements can be overwhelming for a small-to-midsize business that doesn’t have a large IT department, or an IT department for that matter. 43% of cyber attacks are against small to medium sized businesses and 70% of a business's annual revenue is the average cost of a data breach. A data breach can have significant negative impacts on a business.

Scott Singer and Todd Streicher, two guys who have been best friends since their sophomore year in high school, have joined together to do something about this. Scott is a retired Navy Captain with nearly 30 years of experience in IT, cyber security, and DoD contracting. Todd is the founder of 5NINES (derived from the IT goal of having 99.999% uptime), a Madison, WI based managed service provider, MSP, with a client list that includes the city of Madison and the state of Wisconsin. Scott and Todd both recognized that small and midsize businesses were going to need help navigating this complex requirement, and that their backgrounds and expertise were the perfect combination for success. 

Together they joined to form CyberNINES, a cybersecurity consulting firm specializing in helping DoD contractors gain compliance with the DFARS cyber security requirements. They call their service “Compliance Without Complexity®” and, within a year, have begun guiding over 50 clients in Wisconsin and Minnesota on their journey towards compliance. They advise their clients that this could take somewhere between one and three years to achieve compliance, so now is the time to start. They have already exceeded their forecasted revenue projections for 2021.

Thanks to their success, and Scott’s efforts to become a recognized thought leader on this subject, Scott was invited to testify to the Congressional subcommittee on Small Business about the cost and implications to small businesses to become compliant. His testimony prompted several good questions about understanding how this will affect small businesses, how soon they will be assessed (there are over 300,000 DoD contractors who must be compliant), and ongoing costs.

Another measure of their success is their goal to expand into California and bring their experience and expertise to our small businesses here. They turned to Scott’s long-time friend and fellow Sailor, Nick Alaga, to head up the Business Development in California and the West Coast. Nick is also a retired Navy Captain with a strong network established in California. He earned his MBA from the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and has over 30 years of experience in supply chain management. Along with Scott and Todd, he has a strong desire to help California’s small businesses continue to do business with the DoD. 

The overriding mission of CyberNINES is to ensure the integrity of the DoD supply chain, and they recognize the invaluable contribution of the small business to this and our National Security. Scott, Todd, and Nick truly enjoy meeting with the small business owners, learning their businesses and challenges, and doing everything they can to help them maintain and receive continued business with the DoD. Learn more and visit the CyberNINES website by clicking the learn more button below.