Craig Petronella Founder, Petronella Technology Group

For more than two decades, Craig has focused on the intersection where cybersecurity, digital forensics, and practical engineering meet business risk. He started Petronella Technology Group in 2002 out of a belief that small and mid-sized regulated companies deserved the same caliber of security expertise that Fortune 500 firms take for granted, delivered at a price point they can actually afford.

Today the firm operates from its headquarters at 5540 Centerview Drive in Raleigh, North Carolina, and supports clients across healthcare, defense contracting, legal, financial services, engineering, real estate, and public-sector adjacent verticals. The team carries the CMMC Registered Practitioner designation and the firm itself is a verified CMMC-AB Registered Provider Organization (RPO #1449).

Craig's personal focus today is a combination of three things: leading the firm's CMMC compliance practice, personally handling the most sensitive digital forensics engagements (SIM swap, crypto theft, ransomware, business email compromise), and designing the private AI infrastructure that lets Petronella deliver services at a scale a traditional managed services provider cannot match.

He is the architect behind the Petronella private AI cluster and the ten-plus production AI agents that run alongside human experts on behalf of clients, a direction he began investing in seriously years before generative AI became mainstream. That combination, decades of security engineering paired with hands-on AI systems work, is what the firm's clients and peers reach out for.

A note on what Craig is not. He is not a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), and he has deliberately chosen not to pursue that credential; his work sits closer to forensics and applied engineering than to the architecture-and-governance focus that CISSP optimizes for. He is also not a Certified CMMC Assessor (CCA); the CCA role is the independent assessor who evaluates a contractor after Petronella's RP-led readiness work is complete. The two roles are intentionally separated by the Cyber AB, and Craig's role is on the readiness and remediation side.

He is also not a licensed private investigator, and Petronella Technology Group does not operate a traditional mobile-device forensics lab using tools like Cellebrite or EnCase. The firm's forensics specialty is network, cloud, crypto, and financial-fraud forensics. That distinction matters for prospective clients evaluating fit; see the specialties section below.

Craig is also deliberate about the difference between holding a credential and staying current in the discipline it represents. The CWNE in particular is a credential that requires ongoing investment in enterprise wireless design work to stay relevant; the same is true of the CCNA as network architectures shift toward software-defined networking, zero-trust segmentation, and cloud-native security models. The CMMC-RP designation is tied to continuing education requirements set by the Cyber AB. Craig treats each credential as an active practice area, not a framed certificate. When the firm publishes content or takes on client work in one of these areas, Craig is personally accountable for the technical accuracy of the guidance.

The common thread across these specialties is that they are the matters where a wrong step in the first 48 hours causes permanent damage. Digital evidence gets overwritten. Cryptocurrency moves through mixers. Attackers escalate to persistence. Insurance coverage windows close. Compliance clocks tick. Craig built the firm's response playbooks around that reality, and personally stays involved in the highest-stakes engagements.

For clients whose needs fall outside this focused set, Petronella Technology Group works through a network of trusted partners rather than overextending the core team into areas where another specialist delivers better outcomes.

Geographic focus is similarly deliberate. The firm's physical presence is in Raleigh, and a significant portion of day-to-day work happens in the Triangle and across North Carolina generally. That said, CMMC work is national by nature because the Defense Industrial Base supply chain is national; forensics work follows the money and the wire transfers, not state lines; and private AI infrastructure is designed to serve clients wherever their data lives. Craig personally travels for engagements when the work requires physical presence, most often for on-site CMMC enclave assessment, crime-scene style incident response, and pre-C3PAO assessment rehearsals that benefit from in-room dynamics.

The firm's industry focus is equally specific. Petronella serves regulated or regulation-adjacent verticals where getting security right is not optional: defense contracting under the CMMC framework, healthcare under HIPAA, legal practices subject to bar ethics rules on client confidentiality, financial services firms subject to SEC and FINRA expectations, engineering firms holding sensitive intellectual property and controlled technical data, and real estate firms targeted by wire-fraud criminals. Craig has turned down work at companies where the fit was not right, even at scale, because delivering well in the firm's chosen verticals depends on saying no to the wrong engagements.

The firm's content operation includes an ongoing stream of written deep-dives, video demonstrations, and subject-matter explainers under Craig's byline. That content lives across several channels:

• Petronellatech.com blog: long-form technical writing on CMMC, HIPAA, digital forensics, ransomware case patterns, and emerging AI security concerns. This is the primary publishing home.
• Video: explainer videos on CMMC compliance, HIPAA risk assessments, extended detection and response, private AI, and regional real-estate-specific cybersecurity scenarios. Several are embedded throughout the site as click-to-play facades.
• Podcast: a long-running show focused on cybersecurity, compliance, and applied AI for business owners and decision-makers at small and mid-sized firms.
• Published guides: free downloadable playbooks covering topics such as CMMC readiness, HIPAA security rule implementation, AI adoption for regulated verticals, and incident response for small business owners.
• Media and interview appearances: commentary on breach events, ransomware trends, cryptocurrency fraud, and policy matters affecting small-business cybersecurity.

Craig also maintains a presence at LinkedIn where he shares commentary on current threat activity, CMMC policy updates, and the firm's ongoing work. Connecting there is welcome; direct engagement tends to be more productive once context has been established.

On CMMC engagements

The CMMC advisory work starts with a conversation about scope. Before any gap assessment begins, Craig and the client agree on enclave boundaries, which assets handle Controlled Unclassified Information, and what "in scope" actually means for the engagement. This single conversation tends to save six-figure sums of wasted remediation effort; most contractors arrive believing their entire network is in scope when in reality a properly designed enclave can reduce the covered footprint by 70 to 90 percent.

From there, the firm runs a structured readiness cycle: gap assessment against the relevant NIST control set, a shared system security plan drafted collaboratively rather than handed down, a plan of action and milestones that reflects real operational capacity, and hands-on implementation support on the controls most commonly failed during C3PAO assessment. See the full CMMC compliance pillar for depth.

Craig is deliberate about the line between the Registered Practitioner role and the Certified Assessor role. He does readiness, remediation, and rehearsal; he does not assess his own work. When a contractor is ready, the firm hands off cleanly to an independent C3PAO for the formal certification assessment. That separation protects both the client and the integrity of the certification.

On forensics engagements

Forensics work starts with a triage call, usually within an hour of first contact. The first decision is not technical; it is whether to involve law enforcement, insurance carrier, legal counsel, or regulators, and in what order. Making that decision in the wrong sequence can void insurance coverage or compromise a future criminal case. Craig's first thirty minutes on a live incident are spent getting those stakeholders aligned, not running forensic tools.

Technical work follows established chain-of-custody practices. Evidence is acquired, hashed, and preserved in forensically sound form before analysis begins. Working copies are created for investigation. Analysis focuses on the questions the client actually needs answered: Who got in, what did they touch, when did they leave, what did they take, and what is still ticking. Findings are documented in a format defensible if the matter ends up in front of a judge, an insurance adjuster, or a regulator.

For crypto, SIM swap, and wire-fraud matters specifically, the work extends beyond forensics into recovery strategy: subpoena letter support for exchanges and carriers, engagement with receiving banks, coordination with federal fraud-reporting channels, and realistic assessment of recovery probability. Petronella's job is to be honest with clients about what is recoverable and what is not, then pursue the recoverable portion aggressively.

Craig has been building production AI systems for Petronella clients longer than most of the firm's competitors have been paying attention to the category. The firm now operates more than ten in-production AI agents, built and run on Petronella's enterprise private AI cluster, supporting real client workloads every day.

The fleet is not a marketing prop. Each agent does specific work. A voice agent handles inbound calls after hours and books assessment slots directly onto Craig's calendar. A compliance chat agent answers CMMC and HIPAA technical questions for prospective clients twenty-four hours a day. A content agent drafts, reviews, and syndicates subject-matter content so the firm's publishing cadence does not depend on any single human being awake. Multiple private digital-twin voice assistants run inside client environments, handling specific production workflows for those clients.

The architectural decision underneath the fleet matters. Rather than renting time on a public frontier model and piping sensitive client data through it, Petronella runs models on dedicated infrastructure the firm controls. That choice aligns with how CMMC, DFARS, and HIPAA treat data sovereignty. It also means clients can deploy their own private agents behind their own data boundary when that is what their compliance posture requires. Full architectural overview at the private AI cluster pillar.

Craig's personal thesis: the next decade of cybersecurity will be decided by which firms learned to pair human judgment with AI throughput responsibly, and which firms either ignored the shift or outsourced their data governance to a consumer-grade AI product. Petronella is betting firmly on the first path.

The recommended path for most prospective clients:

1. Call 919-348-4912 or use the contact form. The voice line is answered by Penny, the firm's live AI front-desk agent, who will either route live emergencies to Craig or a senior engineer immediately, or book a fifteen-minute scoping call directly onto Craig's calendar within the next business day.
2. Fifteen-minute scoping call. The goal is to understand what you are actually trying to accomplish, whether Petronella is the right firm for it, and what the realistic shape of an engagement would look like. If the answer is that another firm is a better fit, Craig will tell you that on the call.
3. Paid discovery. For engagements that move forward, the first billable step is almost always a paid discovery or readiness assessment. This protects both sides; the client gets a documented baseline that is valuable independent of any follow-on work, and the firm can quote remaining scope against real information rather than guesses.
4. Engagement. Full readiness, implementation, incident response, or advisory work, scoped against the discovery findings.

For active incidents, especially ransomware, BEC, SIM swap, or crypto theft, call 919-348-4912 directly and say "incident" to Penny. The call will be escalated immediately. Speed of first contact materially affects recoverable outcome on these matters.

For media, speaking, or podcast appearance inquiries, the contact form is preferred; please include the publication, the topic focus, and the timeline.