You’re a small DoD (Department of Defense) contractor. After months of preparation, audits, and documentation, you finally pass your CMMC compliance review with flying colors.
The certificate goes up on the wall, your staff breathes a sigh of relief, and you feel confident that your business is ready for the next contract.
But just three months later, your company is in crisis.
You’re locked out of your own systems. Customer data has disappeared.
Even worse, a competitor overseas has somehow obtained your designs and is already reproducing them.
Why CMMC Compliance Is Not Enough
How could this happen to a company that was certified as compliant?
Because compliance was the goal — not security.
This story is fictional, but unfortunately, it’s also realistic. Smaller subcontractors are increasingly targeted by cybercriminals because they’re seen as “softer” entry points into the larger DoD supply chain.
According to recent reports, more than 60% of cyberattacks now target small and mid-sized businesses, and the average cost of a breach can cripple an organization financially.
In the DIB (Defense Industrial Base), the impact extends far beyond balance sheets — it threatens national security.
Cybersecurity Is An Ongoing Initiative
Let’s be clear. CMMC compliance is critical. Without it, you can’t qualify for defense contracts, purchase orders, or bids.
But compliance is ultimately just a snapshot in time. It tells auditors where your company stood on a particular day — not where it will be tomorrow, six months from now, or during the next cyberattack.
Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is a continuous movie. It’s the ongoing story of defending intellectual property, maintaining client trust, and protecting national security.
Threats evolve daily, and adversaries don’t wait for your next audit cycle.
Companies that survive and recover from attacks do more than aim for compliance. They build a culture of security.
“Compliance is what gets you in the door. Cybersecurity is what keeps you in the fight.”
The difference between those two approaches is often the difference between resilience and disaster.
From Checklist to Culture: Three Practical Steps
So how do you move beyond the checklist? Here are three actionable, vendor-neutral ways you can strengthen your Defense Industrial Base cybersecurity posture starting today:
1. Run Realistic Exercises
Think of CMMC 2.0 compliance like a fire drill — it’s only useful if people know how to react when the real emergency happens. Instead of waiting for an incident, schedule quarterly tabletop exercises.
Walk your team through realistic attack scenarios and measure how quickly and effectively they respond.
2. Find and Fix Weak Spots
Most breaches don’t come from the sophisticated zero-day exploits making headlines. They come from everyday vulnerabilities:
A trusted vendor with weak security controls.
An old router still connected to your network.
A cleverly disguised phishing email.
A thorough risk assessment focused on these weak points helps turn compliance into continuous protection.
3. Measure Security Maturity Over Time
Cybersecurity isn’t static. Threats evolve, employees change, and your technology stack grows. That’s why the most resilient companies measure their cybersecurity maturity year over year.
Use a maturity model to benchmark progress and set goals that go beyond minimum compliance. This approach ensures your organization is not only compliant but continuously strengthening its defenses.
A Quick Reality Check
Let’s pause for some self-assessment:
- If a phishing email landed in your inbox tomorrow, how confident are you that 100% of your employees would recognize it and report it?
- If your main file server went down right now, how fast could you recover without losing critical data?
- If a key supplier was breached, how quickly would you know — and what impact would it have on your operations?
If those questions make you uneasy, you’re not alone. Many companies across the DIB achieve compliance but still lack the resilience to respond effectively to real-world attacks.
The uncomfortable truth is that compliance alone doesn’t stop breaches. It provides a foundation, but it doesn’t guarantee security.
The Path Forward: Building a Culture of Security
Here’s the good news: creating a culture of cybersecurity in the Defense Industrial Base doesn’t have to be overwhelming. In fact, it’s about building habits, not just policies.
A culture of security looks like this:
- Ongoing training where employees learn to spot phishing and social engineering attempts.
- Executive involvement in cyber readiness, so it’s not seen as “just IT’s job.”
- Vendor risk management, where suppliers and contractors are regularly reviewed for their own security practices.
- Consistent measurement, where improvements are tracked and celebrated across the organization.
Most importantly, building a culture of security is about taking small, consistent steps. You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. You just need to move from seeing compliance as a finish line to viewing it as a starting point.
Why This Matters for the Defense Industrial Base
The DIB is unique. Unlike commercial industries, a breach doesn’t just threaten profits — it threatens the security of the United States. Nation-state adversaries are actively targeting small and mid-sized contractors, not because those businesses are lucrative on their own, but because they’re doorways into the larger defense supply chain.
That’s why the Department of Defense emphasizes CMMC 2.0 compliance as a baseline. But it’s also why DIB contractors need to go further. Compliance gets you in the door. Cybersecurity keeps you — and our country — in the fight.
How Just Solutions Helps with CMMC Compliance
At Just Solutions, we’ve seen firsthand how organizations struggle with treating compliance as the destination. That’s why our work with Defense Industrial Base companies focuses on building continuous cybersecurity programs, not just one-time compliance projects.
As a Registered Provider Organization (RPO), we help companies:
Translate compliance requirements into real-world practices.
Develop incident response plans that actually work.
Create security roadmaps that improve maturity year over year.
These programs aren’t about passing the audit once. They’re about embedding security into the DNA of your organization so you can grow with confidence and resilience.
If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, reach out. We’d be glad to share examples and lessons learned from helping other DIB contractors strengthen their defenses.