The U.S. Army is launching a pilot program to help small businesses meet the cybersecurity requirements of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program, as the Pentagon moves to integrate these standards into defense contracts.
CMMC – unveiled on Oct.11 – is the DoD’s plan to assess whether companies that handle sensitive unclassified information are compliant with cybersecurity requirements. The first contracts with CMMC requirements built in are expected sometime in fiscal year (FY) 2025.
But small businesses might not have the resources to meet stringent cybersecurity requirements on their own. The Next-Generation Commercial Operations in Defended Enclaves (NCODE) aims to help small businesses better meet the requirements expected as part of the CMMC program.
The program “provides a cyber-secure enclave in a secure environment for small businesses to participate in where they can collaborate, share information, [and] most importantly, do their own work that they need to that would otherwise present a threat vector for actors that we know are very active in the cybersecurity space,” said Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo, during the 2024 Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition ion Oct. 29 in Washington.
The program is compliant with CMMC, “so all of the department’s requirements would be met by operating in this environment,” Camarillo said.
The Army is setting aside about $26 million in both FY 2025 and FY 2026 for the pilot NCODE program.
According to Camarillo, the funding will be an “initial foray in creating kind of a secure classified enclave where there will be collaboration tools, there’ll be a workspace where these companies can kind of do what they need to do, and also kind of begin to do some software development efforts for those that are in that type of business.”
Details on how small businesses can apply to participate in NCODE, as well as the number of participants, are still being finalized by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology.
