Celerium, a cybersecurity company focused on defence contractor protection, announced a visionary strategic partnership with the National Defence Industry Association (NDIA). NDIA is one of the leading industry associations supporting the US defence industrial base and national security ecosystem.
The partnership will highlight a shared focus on defence industrial base cybersecurity, CMMC compliance, and emerging AI-enabled cyber threats involving accelerated vulnerability discovery and exploitation.
Celerium’s partnership builds on years of engagement with the national security community, including its long-standing work with the DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) and the Defence Industrial Base Collaborative Information Sharing Environment (DCISE) to deliver cybersecurity solutions to eligible defence contractors. Tommy McDowell, Celerium’s general manager, brings extensive experience working with small and mid-sized defence contractors on cyber resilience and compliance challenges central to NDIA’s mission.
“Tens of thousands of defence contractors face tremendous pressure to comply with CMMC 2.0 by November. Compliance is complex and costly, particularly for the small and mid-sized contractors that don’t have the resources of larger primes. Celerium is focused on helping those contractors with fast-track, cost-effective solutions that measurably strengthen both security and compliance,” McDowell said.
Celerium, in April 2026, introduced a new integrated platform called the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) CyberDome, to help small- and mid-sized defense contractors to meet rising compliance demands. The platform is a cost-conscious security layer, tailored for businesses lacking the budget and staffing to protect sensitive information at scale.
Celerium also supports compliance with the US Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), a tiered framework that assesses how well organizations safeguard data that could pose national security risks if exposed.
Vince Crisler, Celerium’s Chief Strategy Officer and former White House CISO, said AI is rapidly reshaping the cyber threat landscape for defence contractors.
“AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of software vulnerabilities in ways that increasingly challenge traditional patch-management timelines. Defence contractors need new approaches to network defence that assume adversaries may exploit vulnerabilities faster than many organisations can respond. Traditional patch management alone is no longer sufficient, and the DIB has to be prepared for that reality,” Crisler remarked, while adding that the increasing speed of AI-enabled cyber operations is creating new concerns about resilience across the broader defence supply chain.