How integrated services, secure communications, and adaptable systems keep the mission connected

What does mission readiness look like when threats, technologies, and customer requirements are all changing at once? We recently sat down with Barry Mawyer, CIS Secure’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Services, to discuss what he is seeing across the national security landscape and how integrated services, secure communications, and emerging capabilities can help organizations keep pace.

A Career Rooted in the Mission

Barry’s commitment to national security began long before it became his career. He grew up listening to a grandfather who commanded a tank in World War II and learning from a Navy pilot who had flown in the Pacific. Military school and mentors who served reinforced those early influences, drawing him after college toward the mission he had long been prepared to support. Nearly three decades later, that sense of purpose continues to guide his work.

“I’ve stayed in this space because I really believe in the importance of the things that we’re doing and the priorities of this nation, and how our various industry partners support those missions,” he said.

Mawyer has worked inside large primes, small businesses, and large businesses that grew out of small businesses.  What drew him to CIS Secure was its ability to bring deep secure communications expertise, engineering depth, and integrated service delivery together under one roof, while retaining the agility to scale with evolving mission needs.

“Secure communications is an enabling function for everything that we’re going to do in this domain,” he said.

In our conversation, he kept returning to three themes: the shift toward integrated, adaptable capabilities; the growing importance of unmanned and counter-unmanned systems; and the role services can play in connecting engineering, secure communications, and mission support.

We’re in a period of really dynamic and accelerating change in both our industry and our national security posture. Barry Mawyer, SVP & GM, CIS Secure Services

Designed to Adapt, Not Replace

The push toward modular systems reflects a real need: agencies want to update parts of a system without replacing the whole thing. Under federal law, major defense programs must now be designed using a Modular Open Systems Approach wherever practical, and prioritizing modular, upgradeable systems to accelerate what it calls the “speed of relevance.” The message from the customer is clear: capability has to arrive faster, and it has to keep improving after it is fielded.

Mawyer has seen the value of highly specialized systems. He has also seen how difficult they can be to change when only one provider can modify them. He expects customers to ask for more flexible technologies that fit into larger systems and can be updated as needs shift.

“That’s not going to be the battle space of the future,” he said. “The community will increasingly need to field more adaptable, lower-life-cycle-cost technologies and integrate them into the larger architectures, meeting fast-moving challenges where they emerge.”

For CIS Secure, that means understanding how a customer’s systems work together and where a new capability can fit. Mawyer believes teams that can do that well will be in demand as technology cycles shorten.

UAS and Counter-UAS: A Defining Driver

Mawyer sees counter-UAS as an area where integration matters as much as the equipment itself, and as one of the strongest forces reshaping national and civilian defense missions.

The market signals are hard to miss. MarketsandMarkets values the global counter-UAS market at roughly 9.2 billion dollars in 2026, projected to reach nearly 29.7 billion dollars by 2031, a compound annual growth rate above 26 percent. The same analysis notes that procurement is shifting toward integrated, networked, software-enabled systems rather than isolated equipment. The Pentagon’s most recent budget request underscores the priority, directing significant new investment toward drone and counter-drone capability and rapid fielding.

“These are areas where we have core discriminating capabilities that are highly valuable to the market we’re serving,” Mawyer said.

When Products and Services Learn From Each Other

CIS Secure is well known for secure hardware and mobile technology. Mawyer’s charter is to show how services amplify that legacy rather than sit beside it. The mechanism, he says, is a feedback loop: insight from supporting the mission in the field informs product direction, and product innovation strengthens services delivery.

“The customer expects firms that can bring those two components together and offer integrated solutions,” he said. Quick, closed-loop cycles that inform both the products and the services, he added, will be “a really strong discriminator for us.”

The broader market is moving the same way. Deloitte’s 2026 Aerospace and Defense Industry Outlook describes sustainment and aftermarket work converging into end-to-end service portfolios and names it one of the industry’s most resilient revenue streams. The defense contracting services market overall is projected to approach 906 billion dollars by 2030, driven by outsourced logistics and sustainment, cybersecurity, and secure supply chain management.

Trust, Delivered and Sustained

Integration only matters if it can be trusted. Mawyer emphasizes that new certification standards arrive continually, and that both the products the company builds and the services it delivers have to be protected from exploitation across the supply chain.

That expectation keeps evolving. Requirements for protecting sensitive defense information remain in force through NIST SP 800-171 and DFARS, even as the Department of War reviews and reshapes its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. For a company that engineers, integrates, and sustains secure communications, readiness is not a checkbox. It is part of the promise.

Built for the Mission Ahead

The next mission challenge will not be solved by any single product or organization. It will be met by teams that can integrate the right capabilities quickly, deliver them securely, and stand behind them for the long term.

That is the commitment CIS Secure is making in its services business: secure communications expertise, engineering depth, agility, and scale, brought together for the mission. When communication is critical, that integration is what keeps the mission connected.