Cole McKinley — Chief Technology Officer at USX Cyber

About Cole McKinley

Cole McKinley is Chief Technology Officer at USX Cyber. Location: Sunbury, Ohio, United States.

Most companies do not have a compliance problem. They have an evidence problem. They are doing the work, but cannot prove it when it matters. Logs exist but are not retained, access is controlled but not documented, and patching happens but is not consistently tracked. When audit time comes, everything becomes manual, reactive, and incomplete. That is the gap I focus on. I work with small and mid-sized organizations to turn cybersecurity into something that is not only effective but provable. At USX Cyber, we built the Guardient platform to help teams: • Align real security operations with compliance requirements • Continuously collect audit-ready evidence • Reduce the chaos and overhead of audit preparation I work directly with organizations navigating real audit and compliance requirements across multiple frameworks. This is not about checking a box. It is about building security programs that actually operate and stand up to scrutiny. My background spans both commercial environments and active cyber defense operations. That shapes how I approach security: practical, operational, and grounded in real-world conditions. If you are trying to make sense of compliance or struggling to prove what your team is already doing, feel free to reach out.

Skills

Information Security
System Administration
IT Strategy

Additional experience

Cyber Defense Operations Specialist
United States Air Force
Started November 2009

Education

Bachelor of Technical Management, DeVry University
High School Diploma, Col Crawford High School

Current role

Title: Chief Technology Officer
Company: USX Cyber
Location: Sunbury, Ohio, United States
Started: August 2023

About USX Cyber

USX Cyber was founded in August 2023 with a goal of building cybersecurity differently.We are a veteran-led cybersecurity company headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, built by practitioners with experience across cybersecurity operations, federal environments, defense contracting, compliance, engineering, and risk management.From the beginning, we focused on solving a common problem: security, compliance, technology, and operations are too often treated as separate efforts. Instead of simply reselling a collection of third-party tools, we built our own cybersecurity stack and developed GUARDIENT, our unified security and compliance platform.GUARDIENT brings together security monitoring, detection and response, automation, compliance management, evidence collection, and operational visibility into a system designed to work as one program.That same approach guides how we support our clients. We help organizations design, implement, document, monitor, and continuously improve their cybersecurity programs through cybersecurity engineering, managed detection and response, 24/7 U.S.-based security operations, risk management, technical implementation, and compliance support.For organizations in the Defense Industrial Base, we provide hands-on support throughout the CMMC journey, from scoping and gap identification through remediation, documentation, evidence development, assessment readiness, and ongoing compliance.What makes USX Cyber different is that we do not view cybersecurity as a collection of tools or compliance as a once-a-year exercise. We built the technology, we operate the security program, and we work alongside the people responsible for maintaining it.Our goal is simple: deliver enterprise-level cybersecurity without requiring every organization to build an entire security, compliance, engineering, and SOC team internally.

Industry: Computer and Network Security
Company size: 2-10
Website: usxcyber.com

About Cole McKinley

Skills

Additional experience

Cyber Defense Operations Specialist

Education