Cyber Advisors is now an approved vendor with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for Managed Services. For our government and public safety clients across the state, that means one less procurement hurdle when bringing us on for managed IT support
We're proud to announce that Cyber Advisors has been approved as a Managed Service Provider under the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's (BCA) Vendor Screening Program. This designation means our team has passed the rigorous personnel security and technical vetting required to support law enforcement agencies with access to Criminal Justice Information (CJI.) It makes us one of the select managed service providers in Minnesota trusted to work inside this environment.
For nearly 30 years, Cyber Advisors has built its reputation on solving hard security problems for organizations that can't afford to get it wrong. This milestone is a natural extension of that mission and one we've been working toward because we believe Minnesota's law enforcement agencies deserve a security partner who understands both the technology and the stakes.
This isn't a marketing credential. it's a compliance requirement with teeth. Under the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy, any individual with access to unencrypted CJI must pass a fingerprint-based background check, complete security awareness training, and receive formal authorization through the BCA's Vendor Screening Program. Minnesota law enforcement agencies are prohibited from granting system access to just any IT provider — they're required to work exclusively with vendors who appear in the BCA's approved vendor database.
That restriction exists for good reason. CJI includes some of the most sensitive data in government systems: active investigation files, arrest records, victim and witness information, and confidential informant identities. When that data is mishandled — whether through a careless vendor relationship or a preventable breach — the consequences aren't abstract. They compromise prosecutions, endanger lives, and erode the public trust that law enforcement agencies depend on to do their jobs.
Now that Cyber Advisors holds this approval, Minnesota agencies can engage us for managed IT and security services with confidence that our team meets the personnel security bar CJIS demands — no workarounds, no gaps in the chain of custody for sensitive systems.
Most conversations about law enforcement technology focus on patrol cars, body cameras, and dispatch consoles. But the real exposure often sits underneath... in the records management systems, mobile data terminals, evidence storage platforms, and third-party vendor connections that keep those front-line tools running.
Many Minnesota agencies are still operating on legacy infrastructure that predates modern cybersecurity standards: systems without encryption, unpatched operating systems, and flat networks with little to no segmentation. In that kind of environment, a single compromised workstation can become a launchpad for lateral movement into records management systems, state database connections, and national crime information systems. Every integration point, every body camera upload, every RMS sync, every vendor's remote access session, is a potential opening.
Ransomware has proven just how costly that exposure can be. Multiple municipal police departments across the country have had investigation files, dispatch systems, and years of case data encrypted overnight, forcing impossible choices between paying criminal organizations or absorbing months of manual workarounds and recovery costs. Breaches carry their own separate toll: exposed informant identities put lives at risk, leaked investigation details compromise active prosecutions, and published officer information puts law enforcement families in danger.
This is the environment CJIS compliance exists to defend against and it's the environment we've built our public safety practice around.
CJIS compliance is often framed as a checklist — encryption here, background checks there — but the harder part is implementation. The policy mandates advanced authentication for all CJI access, encryption for data in transit and at rest, comprehensive audit logging, and regular security assessments. Agencies have to meet every one of those requirements without slowing down an officer pulling up a warrant during a traffic stop or a dispatcher routing an emergency call. Security controls that create friction in the field don't just frustrate users — they get worked around, and a bypassed control is often more dangerous than no control at all.
That's the balance a good CJIS-focused provider has to strike: implementing protections that are strong enough to satisfy federal policy and invisible enough that they don't interfere with the job. It requires understanding law enforcement workflows well enough to know where security controls belong and where they'll simply get routed around under operational pressure. Generic IT security, dropped into a law enforcement environment without that context, tends to either under-protect the data or over-restrict the officers relying on it — neither outcome is acceptable when the stakes are this high.
Compliance approval opens the door. What agencies actually need on the other side of that door is a team with the depth to defend a live, 24/7 public safety environment — not a generalist IT vendor bolting on a compliance checklist.
Cyber Advisors has been in business since 1997. That kind of longevity in cybersecurity doesn't happen by accident — it comes from building durable client relationships and adapting through multiple generations of threats, technologies, and compliance frameworks.
Our team collectively holds 366 professional certifications across 26 issuing bodies — a level of credentialed depth that lets agencies work with senior-level expertise across every layer of their environment, not a single generalist wearing every hat:
In practice, this means an agency working with Cyber Advisors isn't relying on a single point of contact or a junior technician working outside their depth. You get access to specialists across governance, offensive testing, cloud, and network operations — the full range of expertise CJIS-caliber environments actually require.
Our public safety practice is built around the services that matter most for CJI environments and round-the-clock agency operations:
Law enforcement doesn't pause for maintenance windows. When systems go down at 3 a.m., officers still need database access, dispatchers still need to route calls, and investigators still need case files. A records management outage doesn't just create inconvenience — it strips officers of warrant information and prior contact history that inform real-time tactical decisions.
That's why resilience has to be engineered in from the start: automated failover so redundant systems take over without waiting on a human to notice, business continuity planning that accounts for how each likely failure scenario gets handled, and recovery procedures that are actually tested — not just documented and shelved. Too many agencies discover their backup systems don't work only in the middle of an actual crisis, when it's too late to fix it.
Our support model reflects that reality. Agencies working with us get on-call staff who understand law enforcement systems specifically, with response commitments built for 24x7 operations — not a general business support desk that operates Monday through Friday and calls back the following week.
If your agency is evaluating managed service providers for CJIS-regulated environments, vendor approval status is the first thing to verify — and now, Cyber Advisors is on that list. Beyond compliance, agencies can expect a partner with a track record spanning nearly three decades, a certification bench built for the full stack of modern security operations, and a services model designed specifically around the demands of continuous public safety operations.
Security in this space isn't about checking a compliance box once and moving on. It's about layered defense — endpoint protection on every device touching the network, continuous monitoring that flags anomalous traffic before it becomes an incident, managed detection and response backed by analysts who know what a public safety network is supposed to look like, regular vulnerability assessments that find weaknesses before an attacker does, and incident response planning that turns a breach from a crisis into a contained, managed event. No single layer is enough on its own — the strength comes from how they work together, so a gap in one control gets caught by the next.
Just as important, that defense has to be tested, not assumed. Penetration testing is what actually proves network segmentation stops lateral movement rather than just looking good in a diagram. Tabletop exercises are what reveal whether an incident response plan holds up when a response team is under real pressure, rather than reading well on a shelf. Agencies that treat these as one-time compliance exercises, rather than ongoing validation, often discover the gaps in their defenses at the worst possible moment — during an actual incident.
We're honored to now be part of the trusted vendor network supporting Minnesota's public safety mission, and we're ready to bring our team's expertise to agencies across the state.
Whether you're evaluating providers for the first time or looking to move away from a generalist IT vendor who can't keep pace with CJIS requirements, our team is ready to talk through your agency's specific environment and where the gaps might be. Contact us to start the conversation, or verify our approved vendor status directly through the Minnesota BCA. We're glad to answer questions, walk through our certifications and service offerings in more detail, or simply serve as a resource as your agency thinks through its security roadmap.