The Department of War just suspended CMMC Phase II certification requirements — but don't mistake a paused deadline for an eliminated obligation. NIST 800-171 and DFARS 7012 are still fully enforced. Here's what actually changed, and what contractors should do in the next 60 days.

The AI decision you keep making without noticing Call it what it is: "AI strategy" is the phrase leaders reach for to put off a decision they're already making. It implies there's one big moment coming, some strategic juncture you'll schedule once the timing's right. There isn't. The decision that truly shapes your AI posture is smaller, quieter, and you're making it repeatedly. Usually without a framework — sometimes without noticing you've made it at all. It's this: when a

Your audit committee is going to ask three questions about your IT audit plan: Is it risk-based? Can you defend it? Does it cover what matters? Here's how to answer all three. Local government internal audit shops hear a consistent question from their audit committees, elected officials, and the public: How do we know this IT audit plan covers what matters? That question carries weight given local government’s mix of legacy systems, lean IT staff, and high-value personal data

Pick a critical system in your environment. Now ask yourself: how many accounts have administrative access to it? How many of those were provisioned in the last 90 days? How many belong to people who no longer work with your organization? How many belong to automated processes whose original purpose no one could explain from memory? If you can answer these questions quickly and confidently, you’re ahead of most organizations. If you can’t, you’re in good company — with real r

By Gillian Tedeschi, Vice President, Securance Consulting. Gillian drives Securance's go-to-market strategy for BEAD cybersecurity technical assistance, working with state broadband offices and subgrantees across the country to connect them with the compliance support they need. If you have received a Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant award, you are likely focused on what comes next: finalizing your network design, securing equipment, coordinating with you

Cyberattacks arrive without warning, escalate within hours, and demand a kind of leadership most executives have never been trained for. When an incident strikes, the decisions that define outcomes aren't made by the technical team alone — and the organizations that weather crises best are the ones whose executive leaders were already prepared."

The average CISO salary in the United States now exceeds $300,000, and that's before benefits, bonuses, and equity. For many small and midsized businesses (SMBs) already stretched across IT and compliance priorities, a full-time executive hire is simply out of reach. But the absence of senior security leadership carries its own price tag. Without someone setting direction, organizations make reactive decisions and are underprepared when an auditor or incident arrives. The que

Proactive security prevents damage; reactive security can only manage it. A purely reactive cybersecurity model centers on cleanup after an incident has already occurred. By waiting for a breach to trigger a response, organizations effectively hand the initiative to attackers, driving up recovery costs and unnecessarily destabilizing operations. When teams mobilize only after a breach becomes visible, the damage is already underway. Attackers have had time to move laterally,

This infographic highlights how a vCISO serves as a strategic security partner by delivering three core services.