vCISO
Proactive oversight, reactive support, and expert guidance to help you navigate all areas of cybersecurity
The job a vCISO actually does
A vCISO is not the person running the tools. They are the one who works out what matters and in what order, brings a clear recommendation, and makes sure the important calls get made deliberately rather than by default.
You do not have to hire someone full time to get that. Our vCISO service is a monthly subscription with an agreed number of hours in it, used for oversight of the work in flight, for the questions that come up between meetings, and for the security questionnaires that arrive without warning.
vCISO Accelerator overview (PDF)Benefits
- One person seeing all of it, instead of a pile of separate reports
- Oversight kept separate from execution
- Recommendations built around your mission, not a maturity score
- Told plainly when you have done enough
Features
Your vCISO sits above every other service rather than beside them.
- Cybersecurity strategy, and the roadmap that turns it into a sequence you can afford
- Oversight across every service, and independent review of what IT delivers
- Guidance through compliance, including CMMC and HIPAA, and readiness for SOC 2
- Policies, plans, and documentation: WISPs, cybersecurity policy, incident response plans
- Support for third-party audits and due diligence
- Advice on cyber insurance
- Reactive questions answered against NIST, ISO, and SOC as they come up
- Serving as your named qualified individual where a regulation requires one
Watching over all of it
Your vCISO sits above every other service rather than beside them. The assessment findings, the phishing results, the audit gaps, the questionnaire that arrived last week. One person sees all of it and makes it add up to a single plan instead of a pile of separate reports.
That includes independent review of the work IT delivers. Keeping oversight separate from execution is what satisfies separation-of-duty requirements, and it means someone is checking that what was asked for is what actually got done.
Built around your mission, not a maturity score
We start from what your business is actually for. The controls that protect a manufacturer’s contracts are not the ones that protect a clinic’s patients, and a strategy that ignores that difference will be expensive in the wrong places.
Every recommendation comes with the reasoning behind it, so the choice in front of you is a real one. The decisions stay yours. Ours is the job of making sure you never have to make them blind.
The least it takes
Knowing what you can safely leave alone is worth as much as knowing what you have to fix. We work toward the least it takes to protect your mission, and we will tell you when we think you have reached it.
That is not cutting corners. It is refusing to recommend controls that make a framework look tidy while doing nothing for the business underneath it.
What does a vCISO actually do?
A vCISO is not the person running the tools. They work out what matters and in what order, bring a clear recommendation, and make sure the important calls get made deliberately rather than by default. It is the job a full-time security chief would do, delivered by an experienced outside advisor, for a business that cannot justify the role as a hire.
We already have IT. Why would we need this as well?
They are different jobs. IT keeps your systems running, which is a full-time role on its own. A vCISO sets the direction, keeps oversight across every service, and independently reviews what IT delivers, which is also what several rules mean by separating oversight from execution.
Can a vCISO be our named qualified individual under NYSDFS Part 500?
Yes. Part 500 requires that a qualified individual oversee and implement your cybersecurity work and report annually to your board, and that role can be filled internally or by an external firm. OrbitalFire fills it for a number of covered entities.
How does the subscription work?
It is monthly, the same as every other service we run. Your contract carries an agreed number of hours each month, and they go wherever they are most useful that month: oversight of the work in flight, a question that comes up between meetings, a security questionnaire that has to be answered by Friday. You are not buying a fixed deliverable and then paying again when something changes.
Who makes the decisions?
You do. Every recommendation comes with the reasoning behind it so the choice in front of you is a real one, and knowing what you can safely leave alone is worth as much as knowing what you have to fix. Our job is making sure you never have to decide blind.
Is a vCISO cheaper than hiring someone?
For a smaller business, yes. Working with a vCISO as part of an outsourced, managed cybersecurity provider gives you a team of highly experienced cybersecurity experts in your industry, for a fraction of the cost of hiring an in-house team qualified to support your business.
Is a vCISO the same as a fractional CISO?
They are the same job, and the industry uses both words. What differs between providers is what comes with the hours: whether they oversee the services running underneath, whether the same person stays on your account, and whether anyone will serve as your named qualified individual when a regulation asks for one. Ask those questions whichever word is on the proposal.
Tell us about your business.
A half-hour conversation about what you're being asked for and where you actually stand. If we can help, you'll have a proposal usually within a day.
Not ready to talk? Check your readiness in five minutes and see where to start.