A Turnkey CMMC Secure Enclave for CUI — Built on Microsoft GCC High

What Is a CMMC Secure Enclave?

A CMMC secure enclave is a segregated environment built specifically to store, process, and transmit Controlled Unclassified Information. Instead of applying the 110 NIST SP 800-171 controls to every laptop, server, and application you own, you concentrate CUI — and the controls that protect it — inside one well-instrumented boundary: encrypted at rest and in transit, gated by strict identity and access management, continuously logged and monitored. Everything outside the enclave stays out of your assessment scope. That's the entire strategy. For most contractors, enterprise-wide compliance means remediating years of accumulated IT decisions; an enclave means certifying a clean, purpose-built environment. Unless CUI genuinely flows through every corner of your business, the enclave wins on cost, speed, and audit surface.

Who Should Consider a Secure Enclave?

Any organization in the DoD supply chain that handles CUI — primes and subcontractors alike — is the obvious candidate: CMMC Level 2 applies wherever that data lives, and an enclave is the fastest defensible way to contain it. But the same architecture serves anyone holding high-sensitivity data under strict compliance obligations: ITAR technical data, regulated health or financial information, criminal-justice data. If you face requirements under any of these frameworks, an enclave is worth a serious look:

Build vs. Buy: Should You Stand Up Your Own GCC High Tenant?

You can build your own enclave: license GCC High, configure the tenant, harden every workload, write the policies, and generate the evidence. Contractors who go that route discover that the licensing alone is a specialty — GCC High is sold through a small circle of authorized partners, with eligibility validation and licensing rules that surprise first-timers — and the configuration work assumes deep familiarity with both Microsoft's government cloud and the assessment objectives a C3PAO will actually test. Budget a year or more of skilled internal effort, then plan for the permanent burden after go-live: patching, monitoring, evidence collection, and keeping configurations from drifting out of compliance. Buying a managed enclave compresses that into weeks, on an architecture that has already survived assessment scrutiny.

What a Managed Enclave Takes Off Your Plate

With the Essendis enclave, licensing is handled — we're a Microsoft Government Cloud reseller and AOS-G partner, so we procure and provision GCC High directly. The security stack arrives configured and mapped to the objectives assessors actually test. Policies, the System Security Plan, and evidence templates come with the environment instead of being written from scratch. And operations don't land on your IT team: our US-based 24x7 Secure Operations Center monitors the enclave, and our engineers keep it patched, tuned, and audit-ready between assessments. Your people keep their day jobs; your compliance program stops depending on whoever last touched the firewall.

Why are "CUI File Sharing" Solutions Not Enough?

Point solutions that promise "compliant CUI file sharing" solve one control family and leave the rest of your obligation untouched. CUI doesn't just sit in shared files — it moves through email, chat, project tools, and engineering systems, and NIST SP 800-171 applies to every system that stores, processes, or transmits it. A file-sharing tool bolted onto a commercial environment usually expands your assessment scope instead of shrinking it. An enclave addresses the whole data lifecycle inside one boundary.

How Do I Know if I'm Working with CUI?

CUI is unclassified information the government requires you to safeguard — in defense work, that's typically technical drawings, specifications, manufacturing data, and export-controlled information. Look at your contracts: DFARS 252.204-7012 clauses, distribution statements on documents, and CUI markings in the data you receive are the clearest signals. Many contractors underestimate what qualifies, then discover CUI scattered across email and file shares during their first scoping exercise. If you hold DoD contracts and aren't certain, assume you have it until a scoping review proves otherwise.

How Do I Know if I Need a Secure Enclave?

Ask three questions. How much of your business actually touches CUI — a program team, or everyone? What would it cost to bring your entire existing environment up to all 110 controls? And who will operate that compliance program year after year? If CUI is concentrated in a fraction of your operations, or your current network would need heavy remediation, isolating the data in a managed enclave is almost always faster and cheaper than an enterprise-wide retrofit.

Is GCC High Required — or Can We Keep Commercial Microsoft 365?

Commercial Microsoft 365 can technically hold some CUI, but it can't satisfy the DFARS 252.204-7012 paragraphs (c)–(g) incident-reporting and sovereignty obligations most defense contracts carry, and it isn't appropriate for ITAR data. GCC sits in the middle and fits some civilian-agency work. For most of the Defense Industrial Base, GCC High is the defensible answer: a US-sovereign Microsoft cloud operated by screened US persons, built to FedRAMP High-equivalent standards, and designed to support ITAR and DFARS 7012 requirements. That's why the Essendis enclave is built on GCC High by default. And no — you don't have to move your whole company. Your commercial tenant keeps running the business; the enclave handles the CUI.

Less than enterprise-wide compliance — that's the point. Pricing depends on user count, the workloads that must move (email, files, CAD, line-of-business systems), and how much of the operation you want managed. Because the enclave concentrates controls on a small footprint, licensing and remediation spend track the size of your CUI population rather than your whole headcount. A scoping conversation produces a real number quickly — we'd rather size it to your environment than quote a misleading average.