RealCISO is proud and excited to offer an innovative, cost-effective way to tackle cybersecurity and compliance needs. Streamlining the process with our web platform, RealCISO helps businesses reduce costs while navigating risk assessments, readiness and remediation activities. We strive to be a great solution for companies looking to maximize their budget without sacrificing quality or effectiveness.

While we recognize that many cybersecurity programs begin with some type of compliance driver, be it federal, state, local or even customer specific, our aim is to make the process cost effective and simple enough that it can grow with your business and be useful no matter what the circumstances. 

Virtual Chief Information Security Office(r) or vCISO offerings have been growing in popularity for years now. Our platform is specifically designed to solve two problems we have seen in the field. 

1. Outsourced vCISO services through consulting firms can get very costly: Typical cybersecurity consulting firms are set up for hourly billing. Depending on the skill level and scope of work, you can expect to pay somewhere in the range of $100-$400 per hour. The most common onboarding workflow for these firms, since as a new client you may not know exactly what it is you need to fix (that’s what you’re hiring them for after all!), is to start out with a risk or gap assessment. The following might not be precise, but it should be pretty accurate:
   1. Assessment hours: 60-100 hours
   2. Total cost: $12,000-$20,000  at $200 per hour
2. vCISO services with a firm can take months of onboarding and evaluation time to start getting plans of action and feedback: The above costs are compounded when you consider that this is just the honeymoon phase of the buyer/vendor relationship and it could be 2-6 months of back and forth evaluations before reports and corrective action recommendations are issued. Following this phase, you can likely expect more hourly costs to begin fixing the problems it took up to 6 months to discover in the first place. 

I lived and breathed this routine for years, all the while wanting a better way to provide value to our customers as a consultant. We at RealCISO see the options for consumers two ways now. 

1. DIYers: Small and medium sized businesses who have a person or two responsible for cybersecurity, either part or full time, but also have a lot of other responsibilities like keeping the business running with operational technology. They, solo or with a little help from their co-workers, know the business and can quickly and easily answer the basic gap assessment questions and have actionable results within hours or days. After which, if skill and availability allow, they can start fixing what needs to be done and if help is needed they can reach out to a firm to start paying for issue resolution and have saved a bunch of time and money doing the discovery in-house.
2. If outside help is just the logical option for you from the get-go, our platform allows (and encourages) firms to use it to streamline their initial discovery process which should directly translate into time and cost savings to the buyer. Since a large hurdle in legacy risk/gap assessment processes is scheduling and logistics to get the answer to questions via spreadsheets and meetings and phone calls; Much of this is solved by allowing both consultant and users to interact in real-time within the platform allowing yet again the resolution phase to arrive much more quickly.

Another unique feature of RealCISO is our marketplace of products and service vendors that can help you meet the cybersecurity needs you’ve identified through the readiness phases within the platform, should you need it. We know that as technology evolves, cyber threats become increasingly more frequent and complex. Because of this, it is critical to stay one step ahead of these growing risks and to have access to the latest security solutions available, that actually solve your problems, without breaking the bank and taking up an exorbitant amount of your time. That’s why we created RealCISO.
Read more about our and others recognition on Network Assured’s website, https://networkassured.com/vendors/services/virtual-ciso.

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