SAM.gov, VOSB, SDVOSB, NAICS, teaming, capability statements
Panic-deleting and powering off destroy the evidence you will need. The first-hour sequence that actually works, the call list decided in advance, a tabletop drill you can run in an afternoon, and what DFARS 252.204-7012 actually requires in 72 hours.
Backups are copies. Recovery is a plan, and almost nobody is required to prove theirs works. RTO and RPO in plain numbers, why dependency order decides what comes back first, running a tabletop drill on a small-business budget, and the compliance gap most contractors get backwards.
Identity is not usually how attackers get in anymore — it’s how they move once they’re inside. A field guide to the access lifecycle: permission creep, day-one offboarding, separating admin accounts from daily-use ones, and the quarterly review almost nobody actually runs.
A real SonicWall-to-pfSense perimeter replacement: what actually gets migrated, the four things that matter at your edge, an honest look at where the savings come from, when NOT to do this, and what the boundary means for contractors.
IT asset management is the unglamorous discipline underneath security, patching, budgeting, and audit readiness. The five layers of a real inventory, how to discover what you actually own, keeping the record from rotting, build vs. buy, and NIST 800-171 / CMMC 3.4.1.
The help desk is the surface area of IT — the only part of the department most people ever touch. Metrics that matter, reading the ticket queue as root-cause intelligence, reducing your own volume, and what service levels mean on a federal contract.
A practical guide to IT monitoring and alerting — the five layers worth watching, what to instrument first on a small-business budget, thresholds that avoid alert fatigue, synthetic checks, and continuous monitoring expectations for federal contractors.
A field-tested playbook for zero-downtime migrations — dependency mapping, cutover sequencing, rollback design, testing, and change-control discipline from twenty-plus years of publicly-traded datacenter moves under SOX.
Getting SBA VOSB certified is a milestone, not a destination. Here’s what nobody tells you between the day the certification email lands in your inbox and the day you sign your first prime subcontract — the real prerequisites, the timeline, the day-after playbook, and the four moves that actually open doors.
