Virtual CISO
Virtual Chief Information Security Officer
What is a Virtual CISO?
vCISO (Virtual CISO) is a service designed to make top-tier security experts available to organizations who need security expertise and guidance. Our team of experts have decades of experience; building information security programs that work WITH business objectives and show measurable improvement to security posture.
How Does FRSecure Approach vCISO Engagements?
A good virtual CISO program begins with a risk assessment. It’s important to understand the current state of your security program so we understand where to focus moving forward.
Once the risk assessment is conducted, you’ll get remediation suggestions from your vCISO, who will be there every step of the way to help you tackle them. After remediation is complete, we reassess, help present the findings to executive leadership, and repeat the steps.
Things to Know
What is a Virtual CISO?
vCISO (Virtual CISO) is a service designed to make top-tier security experts available to organizations who need security expertise and guidance. Our team of experts have decades of experience; building information security programs that work with business objectives and show measurable improvement to security posture.
How much does a Virtual CISO cost?
vCISO services can cost as little as $35k per year and as much as $250k per year. Our typical vCISO engagements decrease in cost over time as our client’s security programs go into “maintenance mode,” where the constant building effort is no longer a factor.
What are the responsibilities of a vCISO?
FRSecure’s vCISO (Virtual CISO) offering is meant to be flexible in order to meet the needs of each of our clients. Engagements typically follow a cycle of assess, plan and remediate.
Whether you need high level guidance on a monthly or quarterly basis or need hands-on help several days per week, our vCISO’s will be able to build a solution for you.
Typical objectives of vCISO engagements include:
- Information security leadership and guidance
- Steering committee leadership or participation
- Security compliance management
- Security policy, process, and procedure development
- Incident response planning
- Security training and awareness
- Board and executive leadership presentations
- Security assessment
- Internal audit
- Penetration testing
- Social engineering
- Vulnerability assessments
- Risk assessment
- And much, much more.
What are the benefits of a vCISO over a CISO?
Lower Cost Over Time
The truth is, CISOs are expensive. Most of them cost between $250k and $350k when you factor in salaries and benefits. That’s not always easy for small- and medium-sized businesses to cover.
A typical vCISO engagement is between $35k and $250k annually and depending on your business’s size and needs. But, most of the work is preliminary, so the involvement (and therefore the cost) decreases over time.
Extensive Industry Knowledge and Skill
Does your “security” person wear a ton of hats in the organization? It’s not uncommon for companies to assign security roles as a secondary function of an employee’s primary role. Because of this, they’re often not true experts.
vCISOs, especially those at FRSecure, are highly skilled and certified experts with years of information security experience. A virtual CISO is going to be able to enhance the internal capabilities of your employees tasked with handling security through the techniques they’ve learned.
Limited Turnover
Let’s face it, the security job market is as competitve as ever. We have to worry about employees leaving anyway, but that only adds to it. With an FRSecure vCISO, you equip your team with the expertise, methodologies, and resources to avoid losing a step—either as you work to hire a new CISO, or if you want our team to occupy that role.
Your Situation
I can’t afford/don’t need a full-time CISO
Most small and middle-sized organizations don’t have the money to hire a CISO or enough work to keep one busy. vCISO service is a great way to apply verifiable industry experience to clarifying your needs and apply scalable bandwidth and flexible costs.
I‘m in IT/HR/Finance/Compliance/Business and don’t know where to start
Most organizations’ appointed “security officers” have very little formal security training and would not count security as their primary job function. Hiring a vCISO will bring access to a team of experts with a wide range of specialized expertise to help augment internal capabilities.
We had a person who did all this stuff, but left and we’re not sure what we want to do
The market for security talent is tough. No turnover is a vCISO advantage as is the application of a proven methodology. Whether you decide to hire another full-time security professional or not, a vCISO can bridge the gap and make sure that expertise isn’t lost in the transition.
Whatever your security challenge, it never hurts to talk to an expert. If we can’t address your need directly, we’ll get you pointed in the right direction.
