A practical guide to understanding CMMC compliance and building a System Security Plan with limited IT staff and budget. Why CMMC Matters for Small Business What is CMMC? Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is the Department of Defense’s way of verifying that contractors protecting sensitive defense information have their security house in order. It’s not optional if you work with the DoD—it’s a requirement. If your small business: Sells to the Department of Defense Works as a subcontractor on DoD projects Handles Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Competes for federal contracts over $150,000 …you need CMMC compliance.

What Is the Shadow Stack? The “shadow stack” is a local inference layer that runs alongside your cloud API usage. Instead of every prompt hitting OpenAI or Anthropic, lightweight or private workloads run on GPUs you already own. You choose the right tier per task. Three deployment tiers: Cloud APIs — Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini. Highest quality, per-token cost, zero ops. Local inference — Llama 3, Mistral, Phi-3 on your hardware. Fixed cost after setup, full data sovereignty.