Margarita Howard’s HX5 Operationalizes CMMC Compliance Before AI Rules Arrive
Brief
Margarita Howard has spent two decades running a company in a government contracting market where the rules rarely hold still .
HX5, the defense and aerospace services firm she founded in 2004 and still leads, supports Department of Defense and NASA missions and has employed over 1,000 people across 34 states and 90 government locations over the course of its history.
For most of that span, the price of remaining eligible to do the work has been a requirement that keeps changing shape. Its current form is the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, known as CMMC, and behind it a second, still-forming set of rules aimed at artificial intelligence. How HX5 has prepared for both is a case study in the need to prepare for sudden shifts in security technology.
The CMMC
For years, contractors handling sensitive government data attested to their own cybersecurity practices.