As private equity and mid-market organizations adopt the work from home transition, there are risks when it comes to cybersecurity and keeping your IT environments secure. Even with these risks present organizations often fail to have effective controls in place often because of lack of resources available to properly secure and ensure compliance standards. With this being the case, it comes as no surprise that cyber criminals have identified this as an opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities and capitalize on the lack of security systems and controls in place.
To help mitigate security threats and enhance security posture, organizations are hiring a virtual Chief Information Security Officer or vCISO. Hiring a vCISO comes as a cost effective alternative to hiring a CISO and experienced IT staff to support the critical functions needed to maintain the security of your IT environment.
What Does a vCISO Do?
In short, vCISO services are designed to provide proactive governance, risk, and compliance disciplines to protect business and IT objectives while minimizing costs. Several of the responsibilities that can be expected from vCISO services include:
- Regular penetration testing & vulnerability scanning
- Assessment and alignment of IT security architecture & policies
- Maintaining compliance & security control standards within industry regulations including PCI, DSS & HIPAA
- Assessing risk and providing advisory services
- Providing ongoing risk metrics for review and decision making
Key Benefits of a vCISO:
Hiring a virtual Chief Information Security Officer, or vCISO, offers organizations an affordable and scalable approach to executive leadership and security expertise while keeping expenses low. The rise of cybersecurity threats and organizations moving to the cloud has opened the door to organizations looking for alternatives to in-house teams with large cost allocations. Below we outline three of the key benefits organizations should expect when leveraging vCISO services.
- Offers Affordable & Extensive Security Leadership: With many organizations navigating uncharted waters, a vCISO offers affordable security leadership and extensive expertise providing the security missions, objectives, and establishing a security framework to protect the company from cybersecurity risks. This is all done without the need for large IT teams and large cost expenditures, helping organizations save time and money.
- Provides Active Security Advisory Services: The more organizations transition to the cloud, the more important it becomes to actively assess threats and monitor the security landscape. These services often need extensive process and security controls which are not always in place. Quality vCISO services provide ongoing security advisory across the threat landscape, vulnerability remediation, and implementation of sustainable security controls to minimize cybersecurity risks across the entire organization. This is an important part of ensuring the mitigation of cyber threats and why vCISO’s play such a critical role in IT security.
- Helps Establish a Security & Risk Framework: Similar to RKON’s vCISO, virtual Chief Information Security Officers are responsible for and will provide the benefit of managing multiple areas of the Security and Risk Framework. The four key areas of focus are:
- IT Governance: These are policies, guidelines, and security standards
- IT Risks: These are risks across projects, services, or third-party partners
- Security Architecture: This includes the review and improvement of endpoint, perimeter, datacenter and cloud environments.
- Metrics: These metrics are shared with executives to be part of the decision making process and include Executive Insights, Top IT Risks, Operational Performance Metrics and more.
RKON’s vCISO Expertise
As a full-service cybersecurity company our mission is to help organizations secure their businesses without large capital expenditures. Our team of security experts have worked with hundreds of organizations in providing vCISO and security advisory services all with varying needs, goals, and challenges. Securing your organization does not need to result in the hiring of large teams or significant capital expenditures; a secure and healthy IT risk and security framework demonstrates success by having IT managing risks, rather than risks managing IT.
Contact the RKON security team for more information on our Security Services.
