Reasons why NOT to work with a Virtual CISO
Let’s imagine you are leading the tech function of a small Saas Startup. Security companies might approach you on a
If you’re struggling to find the right CISO, we’ve got you covered. Our experienced team can safeguard your company’s cybersecurity until you hire the perfect fit — or as long as you need our expertise. Rest easy knowing you’re in safe hands.
Once we start working together, we will generate a Kanban dashboard for you.
It will contain all security domains we will work on and all tasks per domain.
We prioritize and assign tasks to specific people.
Atlant Security works daily with your team, providing the necessary guidance and support.
During agreed times or every day, we work with your team to achieve your Information Security Program’s objectives.
📃 You will receive weekly and monthly reports on the work done.
📅 Every day you will clearly see the work done on the Kanban dashboard.
🔍 Our pricing is transparent.
⏳ It only depends on 1 factor: the number of hours we agree on.
🤝🏻 Let’s meet and discuss your needs – based on our discussion, we will calculate the number of hours you need and send you an offer.
We never take any payment in advance. Your invoice is generated every month only after approval of the work done.
🚀Smaller companies only need 1-3 months of our Virtual CISO help. Once your defenses are built, you will not need our help anymore!
🏗 Larger companies can enjoy our astonishing speed at building your defenses, limited only by the speed at which you can adopt changes.
Because of three reasons: we are faster, cheaper, and better at defense than a single full-time CISO.
We help companies establish a proper password and access management. Password reuse will stop being an issue, you will know who has access and why. Hackers will no longer be able to steal and guess employee passwords.
Our Cloud Virtual CISO services will help you establish mitigation controls for 17 types of cyber attacks: account compromise, unauthorized access, ransomware, network intrusions, malware infections, sabotage, security policy violations, and more.
We will provide security awareness training to your team. People will remember it, as it will be relevant to them. Your Virtual CISO will improve security awareness across the whole company.
Microsoft 365 has 280+ security settings. Amazon Web Services and Azure have hundreds of security configuration options, too - your virtual CISO will take care of ALL of them!
We will help you transform your IT infrastructure's security by implementing Server & Network Device Hardening, Desktop Hardening, Network & Web Service security, Data Security, Backups, and more!
Getting access to a corporate account may grant a hacker access to all internal systems. We will implement secure authentication, ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of your communications.
Breach simulation is an integral part of every Information Security Program. You can rely on us to support you in initiating, executing, and concluding a Penetration Test.
Software development should be a rapid, efficient, and secure process. Our virtual CISO services will help you integrate security into the design, development, testing, integration, and deployment of your code.
Policies and Procedures are the governing laws of a company's business. We create living and breathing documents bringing order and structure to our customers' security practices.
Secure Work From Home is one aspect of remote access, but we also take care of third party partners and outsourced employees, vendors, and guests. Remote access to data is not limited to VPN.
And this is why we expand your defense beyond VPN and add Zero-Trust as your primary defense principle.
Antivirus is just one of the 12 controls we implement to defend endpoints from advanced hacking attacks. We prevent the exploitation of these devices via malicious documents, scripts, 0day vulnerabilities, and more.
We will help you transform your IT infrastructure security by implementing Server & Network Device Hardening, Desktop Hardening, Network & Web Service security, Data Security, Backups, and more!
Every Information Security Program we build and execute for our clients is different. Their teams, infrastructure, applications used, and business objectives are unique, and we often expand our services to serve them better.
Reputation damage and revenue loss can have severe implications for your business. Please don’t leave it up to chance and expose your company to a security breach.
Our part-time Virtual CISO services offer the perfect alternative to the expensive, long-term contracts required when hiring a full-time CISO. We can be flexible around your business needs while still providing a personalized yet cost-effective cyber security strategy so your business doesn’t fall victim to a future threatening security breach.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Some business cases require that a company hires a virtual CISO service for its cloud-only environment. We already have several clients matching that description – with a 100% cloud-based IT infrastructure; some even host their desktops in Amazon Workspaces.
If you decide to migrate to the Cloud, the skills of a regular CISO are no match for your needs, and it is understandable why you may have trouble finding the right skills in defending cloud environments. Let us help you; our team has all the experience you need!
Can a team of seasoned CISOs and security subject matter experts replace the CISO role at an organization by taking the Virtual CISO role?
In 2009 a CISO had to ensure they passed their annual audits and that their antivirus worked correctly. In 2019, a CISO must:
The likelihood of finding someone who can successfully contain all the knowledge and achieve your above performance objectives is incredibly low.
Protecting business-critical data needs to be aligned with business needs. On top of that, which elements would you like to have as part of your security program?
We help organizations improve processes like threat management and building an Identity Management Program. We also help them to establish prevention, Detection, and Response practices. And we even provide security awareness training for executives, regular employees, and IT departments (all of them need different content).
Traditional security program building takes too long. You must figure out the right path, tools, and techniques to jump ahead.
We have seen some old processes and technologies being used – and the people using them thought that just because it was in use for so long, it was still effective and relatively risk-free.
Instead of training your staff and growing your internal capabilities, now you can access a senior resource part-time, maybe a day a week or 4 hours a week, to speed things along.
Some organizations decide to buy things like security appliances and software – and within two years of going that path, they realize that the value of the stuff they bought is not what they expected. Sometimes your budget for a product but then realize you also need to find the right people to operate it or train them – and their compensation was not budgeted at all! That ends up considerably slowing the whole process down.
We can navigate that kind of minefield and ensure that everybody thinks of that kind of variable before making decisions and investing in a technology or solution.
The price for having our team be a company’s CISO depends on our security assessment results and the number of people and hours dedicated to defending your company. Our prices reflect that as all our clients are of different sizes and have additional security requirements. The price is slightly higher than what you would pay for a full-time CISO because you get more people, technology, know-how, experience, and a higher quality of service, which does not go on vacation nor could leave you for a higher-paying job. It starts at $40k per year for smaller companies, and for companies with thousands of employees, it may reach $300k per year or more, depending on any additional services and licenses a large company may need.
What is the average Virtual CISO hourly rate?
Get a Cloud Virtual CISO/CISO as a service instead of spending months searching for a good Information Security Manager. We bill clients annually or monthly because we essentially become a part of your team and deliver results on a project basis, targeting specific defense objectives. But since so many people ask us for the price, we can say that the price for smaller projects is higher and is around $200 an hour. For larger projects, where the work is distributed over a long time and involves much more billable hours, the price can be as low as $100/hour. Virtual CISO consulting services rates strongly depend on the project’s complexity.
You can expect to invest between $5200 and $9000 if your business has only cloud infrastructure and you have between ten and a hundred employees. If you have a large IT team and your software development team is more significant than 20 people, then our CISO as a Service pricing will be higher than $10000 monthly.
The CISO as a service pricing starts at $5200 because a small company needs at least 20 hours a month and will most likely require at least 40 hours in the first month to get rid of all the high criticality risk vulnerabilities we usually find. You can expect the price to decrease after the third month because our involvement gets lower the more vulnerabilities we help you patch and the more secure you become.
A dedicated full-time CISO usually spends one, two, or even three months understanding what is happening in a company.
It is essential to be non-disruptive by getting into processes you don’t yet understand, even if you are vigilant to raise the bar in defense of the organization quickly.
From there, one could determine the maturity level of an organization and build a strategy.
Differences and Similarities
The goals are identical, but there are some differences and similarities between a CISO and a virtual CISO.
Differences:
Similarities:
We might start with different projects depending on the organization’s maturity level. We usually begin with a NIST CSF (NIST Cybersecurity Framework) assessment and how it matches its requirements. We typically run our Cybersecurity Risk Assessment service, including NIST CSF elements, based on the NSA-ISAM (NSA Information Security Assessment Methodology). Sometimes we go deep and include breach susceptibility (penetration testing).
Using the results and the report, we establish a baseline for the client – in parallel to understanding the environment and culture at their company.
We also look at the deliverables the client sets in front of us (if any) and prioritize according to the business’s risk. We identify the major priorities for the first three months – the essential items on our list are usually the risks identified that present a direct threat to the organization.
After identifying those and working on them, we developed a 2 to 3-year strategy for the larger organizations and a one-year plan for the smaller ones, detailing everything we can tackle from a budget and resource perspective.
The limitations from the customer’s side are usually time, people, and resources available for security – and so with the results of our assessment, we strategically prioritize them with the client. We can often request more people and resources to cover the risks identified before materializing realistically.
What are the costs involved?
The first point we usually get into when people look at the virtual CISO option is cost – and from a pricing perspective, it is less expensive to have a virtual one. Sometimes you can’t even find a good one on the market! A CISO typically makes around $200 000 annually, and most organizations have not budgeted that amount for someone to take care of security.
Hiring and keeping the right talent is expensive and risky – many people leave within a year or two, and you would have to go through the same process repeatedly, which can take up to six months even with a good recruitment head-hunting team.
Let’s not forget that’s just the salary – excluding the price of any software, hardware, and external help they need to order – such as penetration testing, incident response, EDR, SIEM, and all kinds of other security services.
If you decide to get a dedicated CISO, you must get a headcount below them.
Let’s do the math, budgeting for a CISO position:
You get to use our whole team of seasoned professionals under one service name: CISO as a Service with our service.
The cost savings are apparent. Let’s take recruitment, for example:
Any head-hunting company charges one or two monthly salaries for finding a CISO; the same applies to other people in the security department.
The average lifespan of a CISO in a company is 1-2 years (source: ISSA.ORG). That means that every 18 months, you will have to spend $20 000 – $40 000 on finding a new CISO and another $5000 – $8000 for each additional team member.
With our service, you save roughly $40 000 every 18 months just on recruitment costs, and you’re getting a higher quality of service. Add to that the cost of re-training every new hire, as they spend up to three months (paid!) learning about their new job and requirements.
On average, the longevity of a CISO in a company is around two years – because they can lose their job for all kinds of reasons, security incidents being just one kind. Yet another reason to go with a virtual CISO – you get to keep improving your security program with the same team, avoiding some of the political and interpersonal relationship risks present when tensions between CIO, CEO, and CISO arise.
For a security program to succeed, employees must stand behind the security strategy laid before them – including the IT and leadership teams. Everyone should care and participate equally, trying not to click on phishing links, reporting suspicious activities, trying not to bypass security measures, and instead writing when they are ineffective so the security team would find better usability and efficiency.
From a CISO service delivery perspective, our responsibility is to help everyone on board to stop seeing security as the ‘department of No’ but as a department that supports business and ensures its survival in the long run.
Our message is: “Here is our assessment of the situation, here are the risks, here are the potential remediation actions from a risk perspective – accept, mitigate, transfer, etc..”
Then the response method, based on the options provided, is with the client’s leadership team.
In most cases, especially in organizations with a less mature security program, the CISO function reports to the CIO – and it might be the most effective form of reporting for them.
Being inside the team is often better than being outside the IT team and telling people what to do without directly seeing the impact of your suggestions on their projects.
If the networking team in the company also does security, when a CISO as a Service expert comes in, they may be viewed as a threat.
We must understand the personnel culture and tactfully diffuse things quickly to build trust.
Sometimes, after we start delivering our Virtual CISO services in the company, we still need to sell ourselves to the internal teams and team members – and we do.
The Information Security Program defines the responsibilities of a virtual CISO (or the company delivering the CISO as a Service offering) created for a customer. They may range from external consulting to hands-on implementation, assessments, team, and individual employee mentoring, security awareness training, hardening security audits, random spot checks, financial reporting on the money spent on cybersecurity to the board, and much more.
Industry Relationships
We have a vast network of friendships, acquaintances, vendors, and industry professionals. We consistently leverage that network to offer a more streamlined and cost-effective service.
On the other hand, when a CISO stays in the same position and company for a long time, its professional network becomes stale and offers less leverage over time.
One of the great benefits of working with our company is the talent we have – even if one is not a PCI expert, when our clients fall under PCI compliance, we can always bring in a phenomenal PCI expert from our team to help them.
Another point is sharing industry knowledge with other consulting companies – 99 percent of the time, we’ve got the same attackers and defend the same infrastructure types. We have about the same technology and we all desire to share success stories to help others mitigate similar threats.
At Atlant Security, we also share information internally in our daily meetings and internal chats – the speed of information flow is much faster than a CISO can afford to read during their daytime job activities.
Our primary responsibility is communicating risk to the business and providing the right tools and expertise to act accordingly.
Having a part-time CISO with our service is better than having a full-time CISO because you get guaranteed service levels and defenses. Hiring full-time means you pay one salary to the headhunter or recruiter/recruitment agency, and you need to train the person in the specifics of your company. That training period usually lasts a few weeks to a few months, depending on its side and the CISO skills.
Part-time CISOs need less time to commute if they work remotely, which gives them more time to work on the company’s defenses. With our service, you can get a highly experienced and qualified security expert to be your part-time CISO.
The team serving as your CISO is always motivated and consistently performs at their highest capacity due to the KPI-based contract between our clients and Atlant Security and the performance rewards system based on client satisfaction and goal achievement.
When you have a CISO-as-a-Service contract with us, it clearly defines the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and objectives. Our invoicing depends on the KPIs achieved, agreed and approved by you.
vCISO stands for Virtual Chief Information Security Officer. Think of it like having a seasoned cybersecurity pro in your corner, helping you out whenever you need it. It’s a super flexible solution for businesses that want top-tier security expertise, but can’t afford a full-time specialist.
Whether you’re running a growing startup or a bustling medium-sized business, a vCISO can be just the ticket. It’s particularly useful if you’re in an industry with lots of regulations (like finance or healthcare), but you’re finding the cost of a full-time cybersecurity expert a bit steep.
A vCISO is like your own personal cybersecurity guide. They’re there to craft security strategies, spot potential risks, keep you on the right side of compliance rules, train your team, and be the first responder to any security hiccups. All of this happens remotely and on a schedule that suits you.
If you are looking to cut costs by hiring a part-time CISO, our service is not for you.
If you look for rapid, efficient, and practical security improvement – then our Virtual CISO service will work wonderfully for you.
With a vCISO, you’re getting a cybersecurity expert who’s there when you need them, without the hefty price tag of a full-time executive. They offer a fresh set of eyes on your security setup, help keep you compliant with regulations, and can be a great resource for training your team on security best practices.
Absolutely! Hiring a full-time CISO can leave a pretty big dent in your budget. With a vCISO, you’re getting that same expertise and guidance, but on a part-time, temporary, or project basis – so it’s a lot friendlier on your wallet.
Key things to keep an eye out for are a solid background in cybersecurity, knowledge about your industry, strategic thinking skills, and a knack for clear communication. They should be able to break down the jargon and explain cybersecurity issues in plain English.
A vCISO is like a remote team member. They can work hand-in-hand with your in-house IT crew, providing expert advice and guidance, leading security projects, and even helping to boost your team’s own cybersecurity skills.
Definitely. vCISOs have their fingers on the pulse of cybersecurity rules and regulations. They can help make sure your practices are up to scratch, create policies to meet the requirements, and keep you in the loop if there are changes in laws and regulations.
For sure! vCISOs know their way around a cyber crisis. They’re there to help pinpoint where a breach came from, limit the damage, keep stakeholders informed, and beef up processes to prevent future attacks.
That’s totally up to you and what your organization needs. You might need a vCISO on board for ongoing support, or just to help out with specific projects or audits. The beauty of a vCISO is their flexibility – they’re there to meet your specific cybersecurity needs.
Let’s imagine you are leading the tech function of a small Saas Startup. Security companies might approach you on a
As businesses continue to digitize and rely more heavily on technology, the need for effective cybersecurity measures becomes increasingly important.
“Anything that can go wrong, does.” Remember Murphy’s law? It is just as valid for your company’s exposure to hackers
In-house recruiters, CTOs, and executives everywhere are wondering: How to find and hire a great CISO to join their team,
Atlant Security © 2024. All rights reserved