VCISO

vCISO.com (Cyber Syndicate, LLC) is a practitioner-led cybersecurity firm providing virtual and fractional CISO leadership. Designed specifically for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), growth-stage startups, and established organizations, the company supplies executive security leadership without the cost or lengthy recruiting timeline required to hire a full-time Chief Information Security Officer.

By unifying compliance readiness, technical validation, and security governance within a single retainer model, vCISO.com delivers both audit preparation and real-world defense.

Core Capabilities & Scope of Services

• Strategic Security Leadership & Strategy: Establishes threat-informed 12-month roadmaps, risk-ranked backlogs, and board-grade reporting aligned with business goals.

• Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC): Authors operational policies, manages quarterly access reviews, conducts vendor risk assessments, answers customer security questionnaires, and leads audit coordination. Supported frameworks include SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC, and NIST CSF.

• Offensive Security & Vulnerability Management: Conducts integrated penetration testing (web applications, APIs, cloud environments) and continuous external attack surface monitoring, prioritizing risks by exploitability rather than standard severity ratings.

• Incident Readiness & Response: Develops incident response runbooks, conducts annual tabletop exercises with leadership and engineering teams, and provides emergency incident response leadership.

• Identity & Endpoint Hardening: Performs security audits across identity providers (Okta), SSO/MFA enforcement, mobile device management (Jamf), and endpoint protection (CrowdStrike).

Engagement Models & Service Tiers

vCISO.com operates on flexible, month-to-month retainers across three primary tiers:

1. Advisory vCISO (From $3,000/month): Best for organizations with internal engineering resources that need senior guidance, policy reviews, roadmap development, and audit direction.

2. Managed vCISO (From $5,000/month): Best for teams needing full ongoing program ownership, including biweekly working sessions, policy authoring, evidence management, and direct audit coordination.

3. Embedded vCISO (Custom, typically $10,000+/month): Best for complex environments, tight audit deadlines, or M&A. Includes hands-on remediation, weekly engineering cadences, board briefings, and same-day incident response.

Key Differentiators

• Practitioner-Led: All engagements are executed directly by senior security professionals holding industry credentials like CISSP, OSCP, and CREST.

• Integrated Testing & Compliance: Combines audit preparation and offensive penetration testing under one provider and contract.

• Agile Agreements: Month-to-month flexibility with a 30-day cancellation policy, eliminating long-term vendor lock-in.