(This is part of a series of stories looking at MSP 501 winners).
Running an MSP isn’t rocket science, but experience working with rocket scientists can help launch an MSP career.
Former NASA engineers Scott Edwards and Ben Curry started Summit 7 in 2008 and pivoted to managed services nearly a decade later. The Huntsville, AL-based MSP has grown enough to rank No. 25 on the 2026 MSP 501.
“I had zero background in managed services — neither did my co-founder,” said CEO Edwards, who was formerly the NASA data center engineering manager. “We both came out of the NASA engineering team. I had a strong systems engineering and design/implementation background, but no ongoing support background of any kind.”
He said they hired one person with MSP experience “and we sat down with a whiteboard and figured out what it would take to support these customers with these compliance and security requirements to standard. We built our managed services offering starting in October 2017 and went live with our first managed services offering in May 2018.”
Edwards’ NASA background as well as military experience (former U.S. Army Signal Corps) and security expertise play a huge role in his success as an MSP. Summit 7 works exclusively with defense contractors, supporting around 1,600 globally.
“We are purely focused on the defense space, federal contractors,” Edwards said. “We're very much about the mission. A lot of our employees are veterans, obviously with clearances required given the type of data we're dealing with. We're a very mission-driven organization.”
Scott Edwards
Edwards has an MBA in information security and Curry is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP.)
“Given everything going on in the world right now, we do have a bit of a target on our back, because adversaries know what we do and where our customer base is,” Edwards said. “It's really important that we continue to provide very high levels of security within the services we deliver. That's really our primary focus — protecting our customers from foreign adversaries trying to steal their data or compromise them in some way. There's a lot of espionage, and we see a lot of attempts from foreign countries. It's a big mission, but something we feel really driven to support.”
Summit 7’s offerings include Guardian managed IT, Vigilance managed security and Commander managed governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). All are tailored for Department of Defense (DoD) contractors.
Edwards said Summit 7 averages 15 new managed clients a month due to its defense and compliance expertise. He said Summit 7’s managed services business is growing more than 100% a year with overall growth in the 40% range for the last several years.
“The reason we're growing is the government regulatory environment around controlled, classified, and export-controlled information,” he said. “DoD and now other federal agencies are requiring their contractor base to meet these standards. We were the first movers; there was nobody in this market when we moved into it in 2018 from a managed services standpoint. So we have a well-known name in this specific vertical. Organic growth from new customers and growth with existing customers has really powered us.”
Summit 7 helps customers meet Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) requirements and carefully manages governance around AI use.
“Because of the type of data we work with, we have to be careful with the AI tool sets we leverage,” Edwards said. “We have a strong governance policy around that. We leverage AI from a security standpoint. Some things we're looking forward to from Microsoft aren't available yet — for example, Copilot for Security isn't available in GovCloud yet. But we're leveraging other AI tool sets, like from ServiceNow, which has built some AI capabilities into their existing platform.”