Week 3 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month highlighted careers in cybersecurity. As cybersecurity and cyber risk management have expanded as a discipline, there are a wide variety of roles specific to risk management, incident response, and compliance. One high-level job to aspire to is a Chief Information Security Officer, or CISO.

While the benefits of having a CISO are well documented, most small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the budget for such a position—with an average salary of $250,000. This is why virtual or fractional Chief Information Security Officers (vCISOs) have become popular, allowing business leaders the option of obtaining the services of highly qualified vCISOs for a fraction of the typical CISO salary.

“How do we deal with areas of risk?”

“Do we know for sure who has access to our data?”

“What do we do if we experience a cyber attack?”

If you as a business leader are struggling to answer these questions, then a vCISO might be able to help. They help solve a wide range of problems for businesses, such as:

§ Assessing the most critical areas of risk and then prioritizing action steps to address the issues.

§ Solutioning with a comprehensive cyber risk management approach.

§ Helping business leaders answer questions such as, “Are we doing everything we can to protect our data?”

§ Preparing a proactive plan to be prepared if a cyber event happens.

There are other ways a vCISO can make a positive impact on your business.

Win Enterprise Scale Customers

If you are a growth-oriented company, you know how important it is to close enterprise-scale customers. Most, if not all, will likely ask you to fill out a standard vendor security questionnaire. They also want evidence that your company has implemented a legitimate Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) program. This will tell them that you have proactively and effectively built in security — as opposed to waiting until the software is written and fixing bugs at the end — to help discover and reduce vulnerabilities early.

Develop an Effective Cyber Risk Management Program

Putting an effective cybersecurity strategy in place can be overwhelming. And with a tight budget, how do you prioritize efforts when it comes to investing in a cyber risk management solution?

This is where a vCISO comes in, helping you implement and evolve your cyber strategy over time to match up with the appropriate needs foreach stage in the company's life cycle.

Prepare for SOC2 Attestation and ISO 27001 Certification

Larger customers typically insist that vendors adhere to recognized standards—SOC 2 attestation as a minimal requirement or ISO 27001—including all policies and processes relevant to how data is controlled and used.

A vCISO serves to review the differences and relative merits of SOC 2 versus ISO 27001, achieve SOC 2 attestation and/or ISO27001 certification, and get you properly prepared for a certification audit by third-party auditors.

For all of the ways a vCISO can help your company download our comprehensive guide detailing solutions and programs that Trava’s vCISOs can deliver.

And to hear straight talk from Trava vCISO, Mike Brooks, listen to his interview with host Jon McLachlan on The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley or your favorite streaming platform.