CMMC Level 2 certification isn't just a compliance checklist. It's a test of whether the technology partners you've chosen can actually get you there. With the federal assessment requirement currently paused, manufacturers in the defense industrial base are left asking a sharper question than “do we need this”: who do we trust to build this program with us, regardless of what the mandate ends up looking like? In this conversation, Mytech's Nathan Austin sits down with Matt Lewis, Chief Security Officer at Field Effect, and Eric Volbrecht, a Registered Practitioner on Mytech's own CMMC team, to talk about what actually separates a serious CMMC partner from a vendor that just says the right words. They cover why credentials like RP and RPO status matter more than marketing claims, how a tool stack you rely on today (backup, EDR, MDR) can quietly fall out of scope if your vendors aren't FedRAMP-aware, why compliance is a program and not a one-time project, and what a self-attestation gone wrong actually costs in legal exposure. Whether the CMMC timeline holds, shifts, or gets rewritten again, the underlying security work doesn't go away. This episode is about how to choose the partner, and the partnership, that gets you through it.