Virtual CISO & program management.
Steady-state compliance leadership for organizations that need senior security oversight without a full-time executive. Monthly retainer, scoped to your size, anchored in the CMMC and NIST 800-171 disciplines.
Why virtual CISO matters in CMMC
CMMC compliance is not a project that ends at certification. The DoD assessment is a snapshot; what happens between snapshots is what determines whether the next snapshot will pass. Most failed reassessments occur not because organizations forgot how to do compliance, but because no one was responsible for keeping it alive.
The work of CMMC is not the assessment. The work of CMMC is everything that happens in the years between assessments.
What a virtual CISO engagement looks like
A typical engagement includes:
- Monthly cadence : a recurring working session with your leadership team to review compliance posture, address emerging risks, and triage decisions.
- Quarterly control testing : sampled re-validation of critical controls to ensure ongoing implementation.
- POA&M maintenance : ongoing tracking and closure of open items, with documentation maintained to assessor standard.
- Policy and procedure stewardship : annual policy reviews, updates triggered by environment or regulatory changes, and version control.
- Incident response support : on-call advisory during security incidents, particularly those involving CUI.
- Vendor risk advisory : review of new vendors, cloud services, and tools for compliance impact before adoption.
- Reassessment preparation : structured preparation in the quarters leading up to the next CMMC reassessment cycle.
What this is not
A virtual CISO engagement does not replace your IT team or MSP. We do not manage your firewalls, configure your endpoints, or administer your identity systems. We provide the security leadership layer that sits above operational IT and ensures that the operational work continues to align with your compliance obligations.
Who this is for
Organizations that have achieved CMMC readiness (or are within months of it) and need a steady-state arrangement to maintain it. Typically organizations between 25 and 250 employees, where a full-time CISO is not yet justified but the absence of one creates compounding risk.
Engagement structure
We structure virtual CISO engagements as monthly retainers with a defined scope of recurring activities and a discretionary advisory budget for ad-hoc requests. Engagements are typically multi-year by mutual preference, but the contract structure permits annual renewal with no penalty.
What it costs
Virtual CISO retainers are scoped to organization size, environment complexity, and the depth of advisory engagement. Pricing is provided in writing during the initial scoping conversation. Most engagements fall within a predictable monthly band.
Your contract eligibility is on a clock. Let’s get to work.
A 30-minute scoping call with a senior consultant. No pitch. We listen, scope honestly, and tell you what we’d do — including whether we are the right fit.
Request a scoping call →