“They know what we need, they understand us. I would highly encourage anybody to use their service.”

Robert Francis | Technology Manager, Prince Service & Manufacturing

The Need: Growth Outpacing a Two-Server IT Setup

Before Prince was acquired and became part of Unified Defense, its technology matched a smaller, slower operation: a basic two-server environment supported by a small internal IT team. That setup worked fine until the acquisition changed everything almost overnight. More employees, more facilities, more equipment, and a lot more government work followed, and government work comes with strings attached.

Any job involving sensitive information requires a structured, secure environment, real firewalls, and real cybersecurity protection. The biggest requirement of all was CMMC certification, a level of security compliance well beyond anything Prince’s internal team had built before. It touches 110 different technical control areas. It’s highly technical, expensive, and not something you can bolt on after the fact. And for Prince, it wasn’t optional. It’s what keeps the company eligible for government contracts at all.

The Response: From Server Upgrades to CMMC Certification

Spinen stepped in as Prince’s off-site network administrators and tackled two priorities at once: scaling the infrastructure and building out compliance. On the infrastructure side, that meant upgraded servers, managed licensing, group policy, and advanced networking to support Prince’s expansion into new buildings and a growing campus.

On the compliance side, Spinen worked directly with the auditors, helped select the right software, tested it, and wrote the processes and procedures Prince needed to get certified. That documentation work is unglamorous, but it’s often the difference between passing an audit and failing one. Rather than handing Prince a prepackaged solution, Spinen treated CMMC as a joint learning effort, building the technical controls together, one requirement at a time.

The partnership has since moved into new territory. Spinen is now helping Prince build AI chatbots so the team can pull answers straight from its own data instead of writing reports or building dashboards by hand.

The Experience: A Co-Managed Model That Actually Works

The division of labor was clear from day one. Prince’s internal team kept the help desk and end-user hardware, the fast, in-person support that keeps daily work moving. Spinen took ownership of the servers, licensing, infrastructure, and security, the deeper technical work that calls for specialists Prince didn’t have on staff. That clarity removed friction almost immediately, and it’s held up through frequent communication and close collaboration ever since.

“Having somebody that’s there for you when something happens is very, very important.”

For Robert, the bigger shift has been personal as much as operational. He’s no longer the only person standing between a problem and a solution.

“It takes enormous amounts of stress off of me, knowing that I am not the final solution to the problem, that I’ve got somebody that I can call.”

The Payoff: Confidence to Chase Bigger Opportunities

CMMC certification isn’t just a checkbox. It’s what keeps Prince eligible for the government contracts that depend on it, and it’s given the company a security posture strong enough to pursue even more of that work with confidence. Just as important, Robert isn’t carrying that responsibility alone anymore. He now has access to engineers and specialists he could never justify hiring in-house, and his internal team gets to spend its time on the bigger projects that used to sit outside its bandwidth.