The Central Ohio Aerospace and Technology Center in Heath — the former Newark Air Force Base, privatised in 1996 and run by the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority — hosts around two dozen employers and roughly two thousand people. The largest of them, Boeing, works on maintenance, repair and overhaul of aerospace and defense guidance and navigation systems, and on radar antenna manufacturing, and has committed to a substantial long-term investment in the site.
That concentration produces something you would not otherwise expect in a county of this size: a genuine defense supply chain, and with it a set of obligations that reach well past the campus fence.
Defense flow-down in a county that doesn't expect it
Suppliers to aerospace and defense operations inherit requirements from their customers. Where the work involves Controlled Unclassified Information, that means NIST SP 800-171 and, increasingly, CMMC certification. The same November 10, 2026 Phase 2 deadline that dominates the market around Dayton applies here in exactly the same way — it simply gets discussed less, because fewer local businesses expect to be in scope.
The most common conversation we have in Licking County is with a machine shop, engineering firm, or specialist supplier that has just been sent a contractual requirement it did not anticipate and has no idea how to scope. The first useful step is always the same: work out precisely where CUI enters, lives, moves, and leaves your environment, because scope determines cost more than any other decision you will make.
Manufacturing and materials
Licking County has a long-established manufacturing and materials base beyond the aerospace campus, and the security pattern there mirrors what we see across Ohio industry: production systems and office networks that were never separated, equipment too old to patch and too functional to replace, and customer security requirements arriving with increasing frequency. Segmentation is almost always the highest-value first move.
Higher education and non-profits
The county's colleges and the organisations around them carry a familiar combination — student and donor records, payment data, research material, and a culture that resists restrictive controls for good academic reasons. The practical work is usually about protecting the data that genuinely requires it without imposing enterprise controls on an environment that will reject them.
Growth from the west
Licking County sits on the growing edge of the Columbus metro, and development along the New Albany and Johnstown corridor continues to reshape the local economy. The large semiconductor investment there is a long-horizon project — construction continues, with the first fab currently targeted for completion around 2030 to 2031 rather than this decade's midpoint.
We mention that timeline plainly because some providers sell against it as though the supplier boom were imminent. The realistic near-term effect on Licking County businesses is steady growth in construction, logistics, professional services, and residential development, rather than a sudden semiconductor supply chain. Plan security for the business you have.
What we deliver in Licking County
Managed security, managed IT including co-managed arrangements, 24/7 SOC monitoring, backup and disaster recovery, NIST 800-171 and CMMC compliance engineering, and security awareness training.
Newark is roughly forty minutes from our Centerburg office, which puts Licking County in the group of places where on-site work is straightforward rather than an expedition.
Just been handed a NIST 800-171 or CMMC requirement by a customer?