Who builds Tiermark, and how

Who builds it

Tiermark is built and operated by Edwards Consulting Group in Swansboro, North Carolina. Chris Edwards is the firm’s Founder and Principal Consultant, with 20 years of experience. His background spans help desk, running IT, and technology leadership. At Amazon Web Services, he taught teams how to use cloud technology; engineering at Amazon and security work in healthcare gave him experience improving systems.

Why it exists

Mid-tier defense contractors hold contracts whose cybersecurity and supply chain clauses reach their suppliers, and most have a contracts manager rather than a supply chain risk team. The usual process is a questionnaire emailed to suppliers, tracked in a spreadsheet, with the evidence living in email. Tiermark replaces that with one record: a supplier map from public records, an outside-in grade for each supplier, signed attestations, a risk register with the notification and corrective action plan clocks, and an audit package you can hand to a contracting officer.

How it is built

Three rules govern everything in Tiermark.

No CUI enters the platform, ever. Tiermark holds supplier information, attestations, public scan data and non-CUI evidence only. Every text a person writes is checked for a controlled-information marking before it is stored, and marked text is refused.

Checks decide, not opinions. What blocks a change is a check that returns the same answer every run, and nothing ships to production without Chris’s approval.

Grades come from passive observation only: public DNS, mail authentication, certificate and TLS signals, the way any visitor to a domain could read them. Nobody’s systems are tested without written authorization from their owner.

What we collect and what we never do is written down in the privacy notice and the terms of service. How we protect it is on the security page.

What Tiermark is not

Tiermark is not a certification body, not an assessor, and not a source of legal or compliance advice. A grade is an observation of public signals. An attestation is a supplier’s own signed statement. An SPRS score from the calculator is an estimate, and Tiermark posts nothing to SPRS. Your contracts decide your obligations.

Questions go to help@tiermark.io, and a person answers. More about the firm is at edwardscg.com.