Cybersecurity & SASE
Your security stack was assembled by whoever called you last.
Every vendor sells the piece they happen to make, so you get overlap in some places and gaps in others.
Cybersecurity Services for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses
We start from what you actually have to protect, source it across more than 200 providers, and put the options side by side — including the ones that pay us less.
What a Breach Costs a Company Your Size
Smaller companies aren't smaller targets. They're softer ones.
Managed Security for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses
The attack surface for small and mid-market companies has grown faster than most internal IT teams can absorb. Remote and hybrid work put users outside the firewall permanently, SaaS sprawl put company data in dozens of places nobody inventories, and ransomware operators now treat a 60-person company as a perfectly good target. Meanwhile the vendor market has gotten louder and harder to read, with every product claiming to be a platform. Gateway starts from your actual posture, decides what genuinely needs to change first, and brings competing proposals with pricing and SLAs you can compare line for line.
- SASE & zero-trust (ZTNA)
- Managed firewall & MDR
- CASB
- Pen testing & vulnerability
- HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, CMMC
- Incident response
- Endpoint detection & response (EDR)
- Email security & phishing defense
- Identity, MFA & single sign-on
- Backup & ransomware recovery
- 24/7 SOC monitoring & alerting
Ransomware Protection for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses
Small and mid-sized companies get hit constantly. They are targeted precisely because they hold real money and real data without a security team watching, and most attacks are opportunistic rather than personal — someone scanning for an exposed remote desktop port or sending ten thousand invoice-themed emails and waiting.
Almost every incident we see starts one of three ways: a stolen password used somewhere multi-factor authentication was not turned on, a phishing email that got clicked, or an internet-facing system that never got patched. That is genuinely good news, because it means the defenses that matter are unglamorous and affordable.
Backups you have actually tested
The single control that decides whether an incident is a bad week or an extinction event. Backups need to be isolated so ransomware cannot encrypt them too, and restored on a schedule so you know they work. Most companies discover their backups are broken on the worst possible day.
Multi-factor authentication everywhere
On email, on remote access, on administrative accounts. It is the cheapest meaningful control in security and the one insurers ask about first. Password-only access to anything reachable from the internet is the gap attackers look for.
Endpoint detection and response
Traditional antivirus matches known threats. EDR watches behavior and can stop an encryption run in progress, which is what actually matters once someone is already inside. Paired with monitoring, it turns a silent breach into an alert.
Patching and exposure management
Knowing what of yours faces the internet, and closing it. Old firewalls, forgotten remote access tools, and unpatched servers are how most opportunistic attacks land.
A written response plan
Who to call, in what order, with what authority. Deciding this during an incident costs hours you do not have, and your insurer will likely require a specific breach hotline be called first.
People who know what to look for
Training that focuses on the two attacks that actually hit small businesses — credential phishing and invoice fraud — rather than a generic annual video nobody remembers.
How We Approach a Security Engagement
Security spending goes wrong in two directions: buying nothing until something happens, or buying an expensive platform that solves a problem you did not have. The process below is built to avoid both.
Posture Review
What is deployed today, what is licensed but not turned on, who has administrative access, how endpoints and identities are managed, and what a real incident would look like on a Tuesday afternoon.
Prioritization
Gaps ranked by actual exposure and by what your team can realistically operate. Identity and endpoint usually come before anything with the word platform in the name.
Competing Proposals
Two to three vendors scoped to the same requirement, with response-time SLAs, escalation paths, and what is genuinely managed versus what still lands on your team.
Rollout & Review
Phased deployment so you are not changing identity, network, and endpoint in the same week — and a standing review as the environment and the threat picture change.
What We Source
Vendor-neutral across the security stack. If a category does not earn its cost in your environment, we will tell you that too.
SASE & Zero Trust (ZTNA)
Replace flat VPN access with identity-aware, least-privilege connectivity that follows the user rather than the office. Usually the highest-leverage change for a hybrid workforce.
Managed Firewall
Next-gen firewall with someone actually watching it — policy management, patching, and rule hygiene handled rather than filed under someday.
MDR & SOC
Managed detection and response with a 24/7 team behind it. The question we push on is what the provider is contractually obligated to do at 2 a.m., not what the dashboard shows.
Email & Identity Security
Phishing and business email compromise remain the most common way in. Conditional access, MFA enforcement, and email filtering that goes past the built-in defaults.
Testing & Vulnerability Management
Penetration testing, continuous vulnerability scanning, and remediation tracking — including the reporting your cyber insurance carrier or largest customer keeps asking for.
Compliance Readiness
HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, and CMMC. We map controls to the tooling and evidence you already have before anyone recommends buying more.
Cyber Insurance Requirements: What Your Carrier Is Actually Asking
This is one of the most common reasons companies call us. The renewal questionnaire lands on a controller's desk, it asks about controls in language nobody in the building uses, and there is a deadline attached. Coverage gets more expensive, gets restricted, or gets declined based on how it is answered.
The questions are more consistent than they look. Carriers have converged on a short list: multi-factor authentication on email, remote access, and administrative accounts. Endpoint detection and response deployed across your machines, not just antivirus. Backups that are isolated from your network and tested, with a stated recovery time. Patch management with a defined cadence. Security awareness training with completion records. A written incident response plan. Email filtering and protections against wire and invoice fraud, which is where most actual claims come from.
The part worth taking seriously: these are increasingly warranties rather than questions. Answering yes to a control you do not actually have is a real problem — if a claim is investigated and the control was not in place, coverage can be denied on that basis after you have already paid premiums for years. “I think we have that” is not an answer worth writing down.
Bring us the questionnaire. We will map every question against what you actually have, tell you plainly where the gaps are, and source competing quotes for whatever needs closing before the deadline. Companies routinely find the fix costs less than the premium increase for saying no.
Secure Remote Access for Hybrid and Remote Employees
The VPN most companies are still running was designed for a different problem. It assumes the office is the safe place and everything outside needs a tunnel back in. Once your applications live in Microsoft 365, your files live in the cloud, and half your people work from home two days a week, that model creates the exact thing you were trying to avoid: anyone with a stolen password gets dropped onto your entire internal network.
The replacement approach is narrower by design. Each person gets access to the specific applications their role requires and nothing else, identity is verified continuously rather than once at login, and device health factors into whether access is granted at all. Someone who steals a credential gets one application instead of the run of the building. It usually performs better too, since traffic stops making a round trip through your office to reach a cloud service.
This is what vendors mean when they say SASE, SSE, or zero trust network access. The acronyms are worth knowing only because they appear on quotes. What matters is whether the approach fits how your people actually work and what it costs against the VPN and firewall renewal you were about to sign anyway — which is the comparison we put in front of you.
HIPAA, PCI, and CMMC Compliance for Missouri and Illinois Businesses
Compliance work goes wrong in one of two directions. Companies either buy a platform that produces paperwork nobody can defend, or they ignore it until a customer, auditor, or insurer forces the issue. The useful middle is knowing which requirements genuinely apply to you and closing the real gaps first.
HIPAA for medical and dental practices
If patient information passes through a system, that vendor generally needs to sign a business associate agreement — and not every provider will. The recurring gaps we find are voicemail and messaging platforms nobody thought about, unencrypted laptops, and no documented risk analysis.
PCI DSS for anyone taking cards
Most smaller merchants can dramatically reduce scope by changing how card data flows rather than by buying more security. Point-to-point encryption and getting your own network out of the payment path is usually cheaper than compliance work on the current setup.
CMMC and defense supply chain
Relevant across this region given the defense manufacturing base here. The rules are in motion right now, so timing advice from six months ago is unreliable — see below.
On CMMC specifically, as of August 2026. Phase 1 requirements took effect in November 2025, and the Department suspended the Phase 2 transition — including the November 2026 third-party certification milestone — in July 2026 pending a program review. What did not change: if you handle controlled unclassified information, the underlying safeguarding obligations under DFARS 252.204-7012 still apply, NIST SP 800-171 is still the standard, incident reporting timelines still apply, and primes are still flowing requirements down to subcontractors regardless of where the certification calendar lands. If a prime is asking you questions, the practical answer is to work the 800-171 controls now rather than wait for the rule to settle. We will tell you honestly what applies to your contracts and source the help you actually need.
Common Questions
We already have a firewall and antivirus. Is that enough?
It was enough when everyone sat in the building and the data sat in the closet. Today most compromises start with a stolen credential rather than a breached perimeter, which is why identity, endpoint detection, and email security tend to matter more than the firewall itself. That is not a reason to panic-buy — it is a reason to look at where the actual exposure is.
How much does cybersecurity cost for a small business?
For a typical 25 to 100 person company, the core stack — endpoint detection, email security, multi-factor authentication, backup, and training — usually lands between $25 and $75 per user per month depending on how much monitoring is included. Add managed detection with a real security operations center and the top of that range rises. Our advisory work costs you nothing and adds nothing to your price; providers pay us, and what we're paid never decides which one we recommend.
What is SASE, in plain terms?
It is networking and security delivered together from the cloud instead of backhauling everything to a box at headquarters. Users connect to what they are authorized for, wherever they are, with the security policy applied in the path. For companies with remote staff and multiple sites it is usually simpler and cheaper than the VPN-plus-firewall architecture it replaces.
What is EDR, and how is it different from antivirus?
Antivirus recognizes known bad files. Endpoint detection and response watches what programs actually do, so it can catch an attack that uses legitimate tools or brand-new malware, and stop an encryption run mid-execution. It also records what happened, which is what lets anyone reconstruct an incident afterward. Most insurers now ask for EDR specifically, not antivirus.
Do you sell security products?
No. We source them. The providers compensate us, and what we're paid never decides which one we recommend, so there is no product we need you to buy.
Do small businesses actually get targeted by ransomware?
Constantly, though targeted is the wrong word. Most attacks are opportunistic — automated scanning for exposed remote access, or mass phishing campaigns — and smaller companies get caught because they have real money and no one watching. The damage is also disproportionate: a large company absorbs a week of downtime, and a fifty-person business often cannot.
Our cyber insurance renewal is asking questions we cannot answer.
That is one of the most common reasons companies call. Carriers now ask about MFA coverage, endpoint detection, backup immutability, and privileged access. We can map what you have against what the questionnaire is asking and close the gaps that actually affect your premium or eligibility.
What happens if we answer the cyber insurance questionnaire wrong?
Potentially a denied claim. Those answers increasingly function as warranties, so if an incident is investigated and a control you attested to was not actually in place, the carrier can decline coverage on that basis — after years of paid premiums. This is why it is worth having someone verify the answers against reality before the form goes back rather than after.
We have an MSP already. Does this conflict?
Usually not. Plenty of capable MSPs are stretched thin on security specifically, or are reselling one stack because that is the one they carry. We work alongside them, and if their solution is the right one we will say so.
Can we replace our VPN with something better for remote employees?
Usually yes, and it is often the right time when the VPN concentrator or firewall is up for renewal. The newer approach grants access per application rather than dropping people onto the whole network, verifies identity continuously, and typically performs better for cloud applications. Whether it saves money depends on your seat count and what you are paying now, which is exactly the comparison we run.
Do we need to be HIPAA compliant if we only handle a little patient data?
Volume does not create an exemption. If you create, receive, maintain, or transmit protected health information on behalf of a covered entity, the obligations apply, and business associate agreements are required with vendors whose systems touch that information. The most commonly missed pieces in small practices are a documented risk analysis and the messaging, voicemail, and file-sharing tools nobody thought of as clinical systems.
How do I choose a cybersecurity provider?
Ask three questions. What do you sell, and what do you make on it? Which of these controls do I genuinely need versus which are you including because they are in your bundle? And what happens at renewal in year three? Most providers in this market are managed service providers selling their own stack, which is not disqualifying but does mean the recommendation and the product are the same thing. Get at least two proposals and make someone explain the differences to you in plain English.
Does security awareness training actually work?
The annual compliance video does very little. What measurably reduces incidents is short, frequent training paired with simulated phishing, focused on the two attacks that actually hit small businesses: credential theft and invoice or wire fraud. Insurers increasingly ask for completion records, so it earns its keep on the renewal as well.
Our prime contractor is asking about CMMC — where do we start?
Start by finding out what you actually handle. If controlled unclassified information touches your systems, NIST SP 800-171 is the standard and the underlying DFARS safeguarding obligations apply regardless of where the certification calendar currently sits. The Phase 2 third-party certification milestone was suspended in July 2026 pending review, but primes are still flowing requirements down, so the work does not pause. Scope which systems are in play, run an honest gap assessment against the 800-171 controls, and close the largest gaps first.
Find Out Where You Actually Stand
A 30-minute conversation about what you run today, what keeps you up at night, and whether the gap is worth spending money on. No pressure and no vendor in the room.
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