Location · Newport News

IT consulting for Newport News defense suppliers

If you sell to the DoD or the prime contractors who do, your compliance posture is the product. CMMC, NIST 800-171, the audit trail your CIO would write. We score it before the auditor does.

That is the Newport News buyer in one paragraph, and most of what follows is the longer version of the same sentence.

Local economy snapshot

Newport News runs on shipbuilding and the federal contract pipeline that feeds it. Newport News Shipbuilding (now HII Newport News Shipbuilding) is the largest industrial employer in Virginia and the only US shipyard that builds aircraft carriers. It also builds and refuels Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines on the same drydocks you can see from the I-664 bridge. Around it sits the densest concentration of tier-2 and tier-3 defense suppliers in Virginia: machine shops, metal fabricators, electrical sub-assemblers, software houses writing prime-side controls, logistics firms moving CUI-tagged material from the loading dock to the carrier slip. Most of those suppliers run $2M to $50M in revenue with 10 to 200 employees. The IT pain is not laptops. It is Controlled Unclassified Information sitting in the wrong tenant, and a SPRS self-assessment score nobody on staff can defend.

Healthcare is the second concentration. Riverside Health System runs the largest hospital network on the Peninsula and pulls a corona of mid-sized practices, behavioral health clinics, and specialty groups into its referral network. Those practices run their own EHR-billing-telehealth stack and carry their own HIPAA exposure. They are not part of the defense story, but they are part of the Newport News story and they show up on the Pulse calendar.

The landmark we look at on the drive in

Newport News Shipbuilding sits on the James River, and the supplier ecosystem that orbits HII is exactly who we score. Norfolk Naval Shipyard sits twenty minutes south in Portsmouth and pulls the same supplier base. Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, and Naval Station Norfolk round out the buyer side. The suppliers that feed those installations sit across Newport News, Hampton, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach. You probably know which of those facilities your contract reads back to.

What we score in a Newport News operator

The CTGA framework scores your business 100-900 across four pillars: Controls, Technology, Growth, Adoption. For a Newport News defense supplier the Controls pillar is load-bearing. We map your environment against the NIST 800-171 control families and the CMMC Level 2 practice families, identify where Controlled Unclassified Information enters your boundary and where it leaves, and rank the gaps by what they cost you on the audit floor. The Technology pillar audits your Microsoft 365 GCC High posture, your GovCon ERP (Deltek Costpoint, Unanet, JAMIS, or Procas), and the identity hygiene that decides who reaches CUI. The Growth pillar scores whether your IT posture is ready for the next option year, the next prime-level opportunity, or the M&A diligence that hits when a PE-backed roll-up comes looking. The Adoption pillar scores whether your staff handles CUI the way your System Security Plan says they do, because controls fail when people do not use them.

For a Riverside-adjacent healthcare practice the scoring shifts. Controls becomes HIPAA Security Rule and 45 CFR §164 Safeguards. Growth becomes payer mix, referral network IT readiness, and the EHR migration that is on the three-year horizon. The methodology is the same. The control families change.

What we score versus what we do not

We score, we name the gaps, and we ride remediation to the audit floor. We do not certify. C3PAOs certify. RPOs prepare and sign the official System Security Plan. Helix Stax is not a Registered Practitioner Organization and does not claim that authority. The CTGA score is portable evidence for your prime, your insurance carrier, your board, and any acquirer. It is not a replacement for the C3PAO signature.

What the engagement looks like at each tier

A Newport News defense supplier inside their first CMMC cycle typically lives in Helix Engagement. At Engagement we come in as your CMMC squad, close the Controls gaps the Pulse score named, and ride the program until your C3PAO walks out signing the certificate. Quarterly re-score. Vendor coordination. Audit-prep documentation. The shepherding work that turns a gap list into a defensible posture.

Helix Operate is the embedded seat for $10M+ suppliers carrying an active CMMC Level 2 deadline inside 12 months, or carrying an M&A diligence process where the acquirer is reading your SPRS score before they read your P&L. Weekly cadence. Board-ready scoring. The CIO seat at the leadership table without the full-time hire.

Helix Pulse Retainer is the light-touch advisory tier, appropriate for smaller suppliers who scored above 400 on the Pulse, have their primary controls in shape, and want a steady hand on the quarterly re-score rather than a rollout squad. Most Newport News operators with a real DoD contract land in Engagement, not Pulse Retainer.

We are sixty minutes from your loading dock

Newport News, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Hampton, and Suffolk are sixty minutes apart at most. We come to you when it makes sense and we run on Zoom when it does not. The first conversation is the Helix Pulse and it costs nothing.

Services Newport News operators pull on most

How we engage in Newport News.

• CMMC Readiness

  The primary service for defense suppliers in your zip code. We score your CMMC posture on the Controls pillar (0-225), write the gap list ranked by what it costs you on the audit floor, and ride the remediation program until your C3PAO assessor signs the certificate. We score; your C3PAO certifies. Different verbs, honest scope.

• CIO Services

  The CIO seat that sits above the CMMC program and the rest of your IT. The seat you need on the org chart without the $260,000-$310,000 first-year cost of filling it full-time. Strategic oversight of the readiness work, the vendor portfolio, the federal pipeline IT readiness, and the M&A diligence support if a roll-up comes calling.

• IT Audit

  The IT-side audit that runs before the C3PAO arrives. We score your stack 100-900, name the SaaS contracts you are paying for and no one opens, and write the rationalization plan that funds the CMMC remediation work out of license savings you already have on the books.

Industries we serve in Newport News

The clusters we work in Newport News.

• Government Contracting

  Newport News is the densest concentration of tier-2 and tier-3 defense suppliers in Virginia. CMMC Level 2 enforcement is the gravity well that pulls the rest of the IT program into shape. This is the P0 industry page for the Hampton Roads CMMC corridor.

• Healthcare

  The Riverside Health System orbit pulls a long tail of mid-sized practices, behavioral health clinics, and specialty groups. HIPAA, 45 CFR §164 Safeguards, BAAs that the EHR vendor sent and nobody read. We score that posture before the breach notification clock starts.

Questions

The things Newport News operators ask.