Virtual CISO consulting services from a practitioner-led firm.
Senior security advisory on a fractional retainer. Productized projects when you need a fixed scope. Embedded leadership when you need a CISO of record. The full virtual CISO consulting engagement, with prices on the page and no annual contract.
We run SOC 2 readiness, ISO 27001 implementation, HIPAA and HITRUST programs, PCI DSS scope decisions, and CMMC Level 2 prep. We answer customer security questionnaires. We brief your board. We lead incident response when something goes wrong. The same senior practitioner you meet on the kickoff call is the one doing the work nine months later.
- Productized $2,500 SOC 2 Sprint or ongoing retainer, your call
- Pentest in-house, included with every Sprint
- Senior practitioner on every engagement, not associates
- Month-to-month retainer, 30 days notice to cancel
What virtual CISO consulting actually is.
A virtual CISO consultant is a senior security executive engaged on a fractional retainer to own your security program. The role is identical to any other Chief Information Security Officer. The contract structure is what differs.
Most security consulting work is project-scoped. A consultancy lands a SOC 2 readiness engagement, ships a 30-page report, hands it to the client, and moves on to the next project. That model works for one-time deliverables. It does not work for an ongoing security program, because the program is not a deliverable. Programs require recurring ownership: the same senior practitioner returning every week to write the next policy, take the next customer call, push the next remediation through engineering, and update the board on the next quarter\'s risk posture.
Virtual CISO consulting is built around that ownership requirement. The engagement is a recurring monthly retainer rather than a fixed-scope project. The consultant is named on the engagement and signs your management representation letter when audit time comes. Scope grows and shrinks with the company. When you outgrow the model and graduate to a full-time CISO, the consultant helps interview the hire and hands off the program.
The clearest way to draw the line: a security consultant ships a project. A virtual CISO consultant runs the program.
Three ways to engage. Pick the shape of work that fits your stage.
Most clients start with a Sprint to test fit, then convert to a retainer. Some run productized projects only and never sign a retainer. Both work. The contracts are designed so you do not have to commit to a long relationship before you know it makes sense.
Fixed-fee, fixed-timeline
The SOC 2 Sprint at $2,500. The AWS Security Review at $3,500. Customer security questionnaires at $1,500 standalone. Each ships in 1 to 2 weeks with a defined deliverable. No retainer required. Best for one-time work or for testing fit before a longer relationship.
Monthly retainer
$5,000/mo. Monthly cadence with a senior practitioner who owns your security strategy, compliance program, customer questionnaire response, and quarterly board reporting. 48-hour response SLA. Best for growth-stage SaaS, healthtech, fintech.
Hands-on retainer
Custom-scoped (Inquire). Weekly cadence. Same scope as Strategic plus weekly syncs, hands-on policy authoring, board briefings, compliance platform admin (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe), same-day response SLA, on-call IR leadership. Best for Series B+ in regulated industries, audit prep on tight timelines, and M&A diligence.
What virtual CISO consulting covers, end to end.
Six work areas show up in every retainer. The mix shifts with engagement phase: heavy gap analysis early, heavy customer questionnaires mid, heavy board cadence at steady state.
Strategic security roadmap
A 12-month roadmap ranked by ROI per dollar spent, tied to actual business drivers: audit dates, customer contract clauses, board asks, M&A diligence requirements. Initiatives are scored by expected loss reduction, not by which framework column is longest.
Compliance program ownership
SOC 2 Type I and Type II, ISO 27001:2022, HIPAA, PCI DSS 4.0, CMMC Level 2, NIST CSF 2.0. We have worked with auditors at Schellman, A-LIGN, BARR, Prescient, and KirkpatrickPrice. Gap assessments tied to production evidence, not policy PDFs.
Policy authoring and governance
Information security, access management, secure SDLC, incident response, vendor management, business continuity, disaster recovery. Written to match how your team actually operates. Versioned, review-scheduled, tied to the controls they support.
Vendor and customer questionnaires
Inbound customer security questionnaires answered in 48 hours. Vanta AutoShare, SecurityScorecard, Whistic, OneTrust, Drata Trust Center, ScalePad Control Map. Vendor inventory tiered by data access, ongoing third-party monitoring.
Board and investor briefings
Quarterly board presentations and investor diligence support. Every metric ties to a material risk with a dollar impact, an owner, and a remediation ETA. Decks are yours to reuse in your next raise or annual review.
Incident response leadership
Pre-written runbooks, semi-annual tabletop exercises, on-call leadership during real incidents. Credential compromise, ransomware, S3 exposure, vendor breach. On day zero, you call us. You do not read someone else’s runbook template.
What we do that other consulting firms do not.
01
We implement, we do not audit
Most consulting firms specialize in audit prep: a 30-page readiness report and a hand-off. We carry the program through implementation, audit fieldwork, and steady-state operations. The same practitioner who writes the gap analysis writes the policy, ships the remediation, and signs the management representation letter.
02
Pentest in-house, included with the Sprint
Most vCISO consultancies are paper-only. They subcontract pentests at extra cost or skip them entirely because the founder is not a practitioner. Our team includes offensive security background. Every $2,500 Sprint includes 8 to 12 hours of focused pentest. Findings tie directly into the security roadmap.
03
Named senior practitioner on every engagement
When a Big 4 firm sends the partner to close and the junior to do the work, you pay for the partner and get the junior. Every retainer here has a named senior practitioner doing the actual work. The person on your kickoff call is the person reviewing your policies in week six and answering your incident escalation in month nine.
04
Month-to-month, no annual contract
Most consulting firms require 6 to 12 month commitments and lock you into a tier you may not need. Every retainer here is month-to-month with 30 days notice. If we are not earning the retainer in a given month, you should not pay it. The Founding Cohort 12-month founder rate is a discount commitment from us, not a contract obligation from you.
What virtual CISO consulting looks like in practice.
Three anonymized engagement shapes that come up often. None of these are guarantees about your engagement; they are pattern descriptions of what the work tends to look like.
Series A SaaS, first SOC 2
A 60-person Series A B2B SaaS company has Vanta running and a folder of policy templates from their legal team. Their auditor surfaced 11 findings two weeks before fieldwork. Their first $400,000 enterprise deal is gated on the SOC 2 attestation and a security questionnaire. We run the 2-week Sprint: trace the auditor’s findings to actual production controls, surface a missing MFA configuration on three SaaS admin accounts, run a focused pentest on their auth flow that catches two real bugs, and ship policy rewrites that match how their engineering team actually deploys. They close the enterprise deal three weeks later. The Sprint converts to an Embedded retainer to maintain the program through Type II.
Healthtech, HIPAA to HITRUST
A digital health company with 45 employees on AWS has HIPAA covered, but a hospital system buyer is now asking for HITRUST certification. Their auditor draft surfaced 11 findings; they engage us 3 weeks before fieldwork. Week one: gap analysis tied to production evidence. Week two: BAA library cleanup, MFA enforcement on three forgotten admin accounts, PHI data-flow diagram, and policy rewrites. The auditor cuts findings from 11 to 2 between draft and final. We then sign an Embedded retainer to lead them through HITRUST e1 certification over the following six months.
Defense sub-prime, CMMC Level 2
A 50-person sub-prime building software for a tier-1 defense prime gets a CMMC Level 2 flowdown clause. They have 9 months until the prime audits them, an outdated SSP from a previous contract, and a tabletop exercise nobody has run in two years. We start with a 4-week readiness review: gap analysis against the 110 NIST SP 800-171 controls, scoping decision (most of their corporate IT is out of CUI scope; the engineering environment is in), and an SSP rewrite that reflects their actual AWS GovCloud setup. We draft the POA&M, prioritize the 14 partial-implementation items, and run a mock C3PAO audit. They pass the prime’s pre-assessment 6 months later. We continue as a retainer through the actual C3PAO assessment.
50% off retainer for our first 5 clients.
Strategic vCISO at $2,500/mo (was $5,000), locked for 12 months. Plus the SOC 2 Sprint at $500 instead of $2,500. Embedded vCISO is custom-scoped and negotiated case-by-case for cohort members. Trade: testimonial, case study rights, willingness to take a reference call. Year two reverts to list pricing.
Not ready to talk? Score your SOC 2 readiness.
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Common questions about virtual CISO consulting.
What does "virtual CISO consulting services" actually mean?
A senior security executive engaged on a fractional retainer to advise on and own your security program. Same role as any full-time CISO, delivered remotely, billed monthly. The "consulting" framing distinguishes it from in-house leadership: you get strategic ownership, audit-grade artifacts, and incident response readiness without the full-time hire. Unlike most "consulting" engagements, virtual CISO consulting is recurring and outcome-owned, not project-scoped.
How is this different from a project-scoped consulting engagement?
A project-scoped consulting engagement ends when the deliverable is delivered. A SOC 2 readiness project ends with the report; a policy refresh ends with the policy set. Virtual CISO consulting is the ongoing program around those deliverables. The same senior practitioner who shipped your SOC 2 readiness still answers your customer questionnaires three months later, takes your board call six months later, and leads your incident response when something breaks at month nine.
How does virtual CISO consulting compare to Big 4 consultancy?
Big 4 firms (Deloitte, KPMG, EY, PwC) offer vCISO consulting at $20,000 to $40,000 per month with partner-rate billing. The named partner shows up to kickoff and quarterly reviews; associates run the day-to-day work. Practitioner-led firms charge $5,000 to $10,000 per month and the senior practitioner is the one doing the work. Pick Big 4 if you need the brand for procurement gates; pick boutique if you need the work done by senior hands.
Do you do project work, retainer, or both?
Both. The SOC 2 Sprint is a productized 2-week project at $2,500 fixed-fee. The 90-Day vCISO Foundation is a productized 90-day program build at $24,000 fixed-fee. The AWS Security Review is a productized 1-week project at $3,500. Customer security questionnaires can be a per-questionnaire engagement at $1,500. Retainer is the ongoing relationship: $5,000/mo Strategic vCISO or custom-scoped Embedded vCISO. Most clients do one Sprint or Foundation, then convert to retainer; some do projects only and never sign a retainer. Both work.
Can a virtual CISO consultant sign my management representation letter?
Yes, when serving as the company's CISO of record during the engagement. The management representation letter requires a single accountable security executive; a vCISO retainer client lists the engaged vCISO in that role. This is a key reason companies hire virtual CISO consulting on retainer instead of running an unnamed consultancy engagement: auditors require a single accountable security owner.
How fast do virtual CISO consulting engagements start?
A SOC 2 Sprint kicks off within 2 weeks of signing. Embedded retainer engagements typically start within 2 to 4 weeks. The contracting process is intentionally fast: a one-page master services agreement with statement-of-work attachments per engagement. We do not run 6 to 8 week procurement cycles unless your buyer requires it.
What does virtual CISO consulting cost?
Industry-wide, virtual CISO consulting retainers run $3,000 to $15,000 per month depending on engagement depth. Below $3,000/mo you are typically getting a junior consultant. Our published rate is $5,000/mo for Strategic vCISO; Embedded vCISO is custom-scoped (Inquire) for audit prep, M&A, and complex programs. Founding cohort pricing puts Strategic vCISO at $2,500/mo for 12 months; Embedded is negotiated case-by-case for cohort members. Productized projects (Sprint, Foundation, AWS Review, questionnaires) are fixed-fee. See the full pricing page for details.
Do virtual CISO consultants do penetration testing?
Some do, most do not. The typical vCISO is a paper-only consultant who subcontracts pentests to a separate firm at extra cost. Practitioner-led firms with offensive security backgrounds run pentests in-house. Every SOC 2 Sprint we deliver includes an 8 to 12 hour focused pentest at no additional cost. Embedded retainer clients get an annual full-scope pentest as part of the engagement.
Can virtual CISO consulting handle multiple frameworks at once?
Yes. Most enterprise buyers ask for SOC 2 plus another framework (ISO 27001 for European deals, HIPAA for healthcare-adjacent products, PCI DSS for payments components, CMMC for defense contractors). Frameworks stack: 70 to 80% of the underlying controls overlap. Running them in parallel is faster and cheaper than running them sequentially.
When do I outgrow virtual CISO consulting?
Four signals: (1) you cross 250 employees with material risk profile, (2) you operate three or more regulated frameworks simultaneously and need full-time attention to all, (3) you have an in-house security team of three or more that needs a permanent leader, or (4) your investors specifically want a full-time security executive on staff. Most engagements end with us helping interview the eventual full-time CISO hire and handing off the program on day one.