Some announcements are vanity. This one is a verification: CLOUD2E is now listed in the MSP Collective’s ESP Directory — a national directory of External Service Providers whose CMMC Level 2 certifications are validated with the C3PAO that performed the assessment. It is a short list: the Collective reported just over 50 listed organizations nationwide as of late summer 2026. Here is what the listing means, and why we think directories like this one are good for the entire Defense Industrial Base.
The news
The MSP Collective announced CLOUD2E’s addition to the ESP Directory — you can read the Collective’s own post on LinkedIn, and our team’s announcement. The directory lists MSPs and MSSPs that have achieved CMMC Level 2 certification through a C3PAO assessment of their own environment — not a self-attestation, not a roadmap, a passed assessment — and the Collective validates each listing directly with the issuing C3PAO.
What the MSP Collective is
The MSP Collective — formally, MSPs for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure — is an industry group of managed service and managed security providers serving the defense and critical-infrastructure space. Beyond the directory, it works as an advisory voice to Congress, the DoD, and the Cyber AB on how External Service Providers should be secured and regulated — including pushing for minimum ESP security requirements that go beyond what DFARS 252.204-7012 and NIST SP 800-171 already demand, and advocating for the small businesses that make up most of the Defense Industrial Base.
Why “trusted ESP” is a CMMC question, not a marketing phrase
Under the CMMC program, an External Service Provider is any outside company whose people, processes, or technology touch your covered environment — which describes almost every MSP relationship in existence. The final rule made the consequence explicit: your ESP does not need its own CMMC certificate, but the services it provides to you are examined inside YOUR assessment. Your MSP’s access, tooling, and security practices are part of your scope whether anyone planned for that or not.
- If your MSP’s practices are weak, that weakness surfaces in your assessment — at the worst possible moment.
- MSPs are a known attack vector into the DIB; an MSP with privileged access to twenty contractors is a richer target than any one of them.
- An ESP that has passed its own Level 2 assessment has already proven, under an assessor’s scrutiny, the exact disciplines it will be exercising in your environment.
This is the same reason we built our own enclave and sat our own C3PAO assessment before asking clients to trust us with theirs — the story behind our CMMC Level 2 preparation practice.
What it means if you work with us (or are deciding to)
For current clients: nothing changes except your evidence. When your assessor asks about your ESP, you point at a validated directory listing and a Level 2 certificate instead of a vendor questionnaire. For contractors choosing a provider: add “are you in the MSP Collective ESP Directory, or can your certificate be validated with your C3PAO?” to the checklist in our guide on choosing a CMMC compliance company — it is a one-question filter that removes most of the field.
And if you are starting from scratch: our CMMC compliance services and the free CMMC Tracker are run by the same team, under the same certified practices, that this listing validates. That is the whole idea.