Boards aren’t asking whether security matters anymore—they’re asking who can lead it and show progress fast. We dig into why the CISO seat now belongs at the executive table and how SMBs can access that leadership through a pragmatic fractional model that drives measurable results without bloating headcount.

We lay out the red flags that waste budget—claims of “unhackable” systems, tool-first thinking with no process, and leaders who can’t translate risk into business terms. Then we get tactical: how to structure scope and cadence, set escalation paths for incidents, and build trust with a 90-day plan that starts with discovery, moves to prioritization, and delivers quick wins. Expect concrete deliverables like policies, risk assessments, remediation roadmaps, incident response plans, vendor reviews, board-ready reporting, and a clear security awareness program.

You’ll also hear which metrics actually matter: fewer critical vulnerabilities, faster detection and response, stronger audit outcomes, improved phishing resilience, and better vendor risk scores. We unpack engagement models—retainers, project-based work, and hybrid on-call—and show how a right-sized start can scale. A real-world case study ties it together: a mid-market manufacturer invested in a fractional CISO, earned compliance certification in nine months, won a multimillion-dollar contract, and cut cyber insurance premiums. We round out with triggers for transitioning to a full-time CISO—headcount, budget thresholds, team size, regulatory demands—and a simple checklist to evaluate readiness and candidate fit.

If you’re ready to turn security into a growth lever, this conversation gives you the blueprint: structure the engagement, measure what matters, and give your security leader access to people and decisions. Subscribe, share with your team, and leave a review to tell us which metric you’ll track first.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the New Cyber Risk Podcast, where we provide you the cybersecurity training, tools, and expertise you need to protect your company from the evil hacker whore. Hi, my name is Sean Gerber, and I'm your host for this action-packed and informative podcast. Join me each week as I provide the information you need to secure and protect your organization and reduce your cybersecurity risk. All right, let's get started. Hey Alex Chung here with the Reduced Cyber Risk Podcast, and hope you all are having a beautifully blessed day today. Today we are gonna be going into part two of the Fractional CISO. So again, this is Enterprise Security Leadership for SMBs, and this is gonna be part two. We had part one last week. Again, this is a very long section, so we decided to reduce that risk and reduce it down to basically two different podcasts specifically. So before we do that, I wanted an article I wanted to talk to you about related to CISOs. So this is from Dark Reading. And now, if you've all just never kind of tuned in on this, Dark Reading is actually a really good publication. I highly recommend you watch or listen to this, not listen to the read this article related to CISOs and their grow to prominence. However, if you want to look and get a lot of different types of uh information related to cybersecurity, you can go what they call infosecindustry.com. And that actually has a lot of the cybersecurity aspects that are built into it. You know, different feeds coming from all over the place that can help you with understanding different types of cybersecurity pieces. So a great thing, InfoSec Industry. But back to the CISOs and their rise to prominence. Well, the chief information security officer or CISO, they are being increasingly being promoted to executive level roles rather than the mid-level IT levels that they've had. And I'll tell you some personal experience related to that. When I was hired as a CISO, I was regulated to more of a mid-level IT role until I built up the credibility and the influence to be able to rise to a higher level. And it took a lot of time and a lot of influence and a lot of work to get to that point. Now people are coming into these roles as a CISO that are more of executive from the beginning. And it actually is a really good thought process because they bring a view that many different leader business leaders do not quite totally understand. And the reason for this shift is because there's a broader reliance on digital infrastructure and the rising threat component. So we know that this is becoming a bigger factor for so many businesses. So therefore, what are they doing? They're hiring individuals that have this knowledge and expertise. Also, regulatory requirements and compliance pressures are adding that additional oversight that they have to find somebody and put them in the seat to help them make the best decisions for their organization. And then also the growing attack surface. Now, what we mean by that is you used to be in the past where you had a facility that it was at one place, right? You had an area that you had your location at. But now with the growing cloud environments, and you don't just have one, you have multiples. You know, you got GCP Google Cloud Platform, you've got Azure, you've got AWS, and you have your physical on-prem location. You now have all of this dispersed in various locations. And then to add more complexity to that is if you are a multinational business, you have to add that into it as well. And I, in the case of myself, I was dealing with AWS, I was dealing with Azure, I was dealing with on-prem locations within the United States, China, and Europe. And then on top of that, I had to deal with the Chinese cloud and their version of it. So there's a lot of different moving parts that are all going on here. And for a CISO, you really need someone with the technical strategic leadership to help you in that space. So that because these CISOs are now on board, they're taking more of a strategic decision making and they're expected to bridge the technical risk with the business and compliance considerations. And it's an important part of any organization. Hence, that's why we're going to talk about the fractional CISO today. And again, part two of the fractional CISO is around that specific topic as well. So elevated titles do not automatically solve resource or burnout issues. CISOs still face wide-ranging responsibilities with limited support. They don't always have the support they need. And they also struggle with sometimes the pay that is commensurate with a C-level position. So smaller organizations will struggle to provide dedicated resources, hence the fractional CISO, important part, and that was brought up in this article on how they may struggle with that specifically. So I think that's an important part of why we're talking about the fractional CISO aspects. But bottom line is that the CISO role is a is moved from a back office technical person to more of a core strategic executive level role. And it has expansive technologies and expansive capabilities and responsibilities within your organization because of that aspect. So again, I want to consider, look at the overall CISO, read the article. It's great. Dark reading, CISO's rise to prominence. Security leaders join the executive suite. Okay, so before we get into what we're going to talk about today, part two of the CISO fractional CISO, we wanted a quick sort of a shout out for Reduce Cyber Risk. You can head on over to Reduce Cyber Risk. A lot of great free stuff that's over there, as well as just kind of some information around what we're capable of doing. Some of the services that we will provide are fractional CISOs. We provide assessments and audits, insider risk management, BC business continuity and business resiliency. All of those pieces are available to you from dealing with financial institutions to medical institutions to just you name it. We can cover it. I have a large group of people that I work with, and Reduce Cyber Risk can help you with that. So again, if you're looking for those things, we can help you at Reduce Cyber Risk. Okay, so this is part two of the Fractional CISO presentation: Enterprise Security Leadership for SMBs. You can get this video at Reduce Cyber Risk. Uh, as you're listening to this podcast, if you want to look at the video and read it a little bit later, all of that is available to you at Reduce Cyber Risk on our blog. Okay, let's get started. So some red flags and pitfalls to avoid. Yeah, this is a big one. Kennets who promise uh 100% security or unhackable systems. So if you have anybody that's telling you that, then you should run as fast away from them as you can. They don't understand security because it's not nothing's 100%. And I would highly bet that you're not going to find someone who's actually gonna say that. But if they ever do, yeah, you don't want them. Overreliance on tools, technology without strategy. So there's tools, there's people, and there's processes. There's those three things, right? People will focus on the tools and getting those right, but they won't focus on the people and how to fix them and the processes that go into that. So you the over reliance on those tools can put you in a tight pinch because the tools are expensive, and if you don't have the processes to actually build those out, it can actually cause you more challenges down the road. The inability to explain complex security concepts in business terms. This comes back to the communication piece. Do they know how to do that? If they don't know how to do that, then you have a problem and you have more of a technical person, and they may not be the best fit for a CISO. No experience with your industry specific compliance requirements. Now, is that a definite no? It's not. If they have specific compliance requirements that are in a similar industry, it wouldn't, you would want to have them kind of understand a little bit more what are the compliance requirements they have been dealing with. Because when it comes right down to it, compliance is compliance. But if if yours is very unique, very specific, and for example, I'll say if a person was in the manufacturing space their entire career and they understood manufacturing compliance requirements and manufacturing regulatory requirements, and they went into a healthcare industry, could they do that? Most definitely, because there's a lot of overlap. However, if you had a lot of good candidates on the hook, that this might be an area that you go, well, maybe I don't want to hire this person because of this. That is something to consider. But are they both very easily workable? Yes, they are. It's just one of those aspects that you may want to put in the back of your mind as something that could or could not push somebody out of the business. Unwillingness to provide clear scope of work and deliverables. Have they been able to provide? Have they been able to make stuff? Have they been able to do that and deliver on what they said they can? And then pushing expensive solutions without understanding your overall risk profile. I've seen this time and again. Buying really expensive tools to put into an area that you have a your risk is much less than what these expensive tools can provide. So it's just an important piece of all of this that you need to really get prepared for. So avoid these pitfalls at all costs. So here's a couple more. So expecting overnight transformation of your security posture. This isn't going to happen. This is process if they start with you today and they get going. At a minimum, you should have expectations and metrics after one year, six months, and after one year, where you will be. But I will tell you that this is a multi-year process. If you hire a CISO, a fractional CISO, be prepared to have them on the books for at least two years. And the reason I say that is unless you already have a program in place. But the reason I say that is because it takes at least two years to get everything up and going. Between working with all of your people you currently have and trying to implement things, it to get your program solid will take two years. Thinking the fractional CISO will handle all your IT security tasks. Those are unrealistic expectations. They won't do it. And if you expect that, then you're, I'm sorry, but you will roll through security people very, very quickly. Not allocating enough budget for implementing the controls. You bring on a CISO, there's other additional costs that are going to come on with this, and that is security tools and security types of services that you may have to buy. There's going to be a budget for that. You're going to have to have a line item in your budget for these specific areas. However, this is where I come back to the CISO needs to be one that can help you with managing that and having a good plan on how to get there. Failing to involve them in strategic business decisions. If you don't bring them into the mix, they can't help you. That's just bottom line. If you can't don't bring them into the conversations you have with the business owners with what your plan is, it's just not going to happen. So it's something for you to consider is that you need to bring them into all strategic business decisions. My former CEO did not bring me in on a couple decisions that they made. And doing so, I didn't say cost them, but it put them in a little bit of a position. So it's imperative that you bring your CISO in on any decisions you make from a strategic thought process. Not giving them access to the necessary systems and the stakeholders. Basically saying, Well, you just talk to IT. You can't talk to the business leaders. You can't talk to compliance. You can't talk to this person. If you do that, you're going to basically hamstring them. You're going to limit what they can do. And because of that, it's just going to cause you nothing but challenges. All right. So structuring the engagement, this is where the CISO needs to have a structured engagement with you on this. What are they going to do? They're going to define the clear scope and strategy and their tactical responsibilities. So they're going to come in and say, these are strategic, these are tactical. This is what they're going to do. They're going to establish regular meeting cadences with leadership, the MSPs, IT teams. They're going to set this stuff up on a routine basis to get everybody connected. They're going to set specific deliverables and timelines, things that have to be done and when they have to be completed. And then they're going to determine escalation paths for the incident. Meaning that if something were to occur at a facility and there's a ransomware attack, for example, they have the ability to go in and make those changes and be able to escalate it and develop it into an incident. They create communication protocols with your IT and your managed service provider. Again, back to the part of setting up regular meetings and then build in quarterly reviews and program assessments to help making sure leadership is aware of what's required. Now, the first 90 days, what should you expect? One, the within day one, when they hit the ground running to day 30, they should do a security assessment and a gap assessment to determine what is actually going on within your company. They can help determine what how big is the problem or how little is the challenge. That's the ultimate goal. They'll figure that part out and they'll be asking lots of questions, doing lots of question QAs. They may be having meetings to determine what is what they actually have, what are they holding on to here. The next 30 days is going to be risk prioritization and roadmap development. What are they going to start putting in place to mitigate some of the risks that they currently have within the company? Now that doesn't mean they're going to wait till day 60 to start implementing these. They may start doing some of those on day 30 if they see that there's a gap that's like, oh my gosh, this is something we have to fix right away. They will do that in day 30, day 60, obviously, that we would want that to occur. But day 60 to day 90 is where they implement quick wins and get strategic planning in place and then they start getting that comprehensive roadmap going. So you should expect, if you're listening to this and you're a business leader, you should expect a deliverable from them at the end of that 90 days that is giving them all that information. However, I would also ask, you shouldn't really wait for the 90-day point. You should be having routine update checks with them to know where are you at and what are you going to do. So there's a lots of different things that they can provide you as a fractional CISO. Other key deliverables you should expect to receive, written security policies and procedures. If you don't have those in place now, they'll make those for you. Risk assessments and read me remediation roadmaps, how to fix the problem, right? What's the roadmap? We're here now. This is where we want to go. Incident response plans. They have to have a come up with a plan on how to respond to an incident if and when it does occur. What are the gaps in compliance and then how do they remediate those? Vendor security assessments, what happens? You have vendors that come on. The thing that most businesses don't realize is that you bring on a vendor, you're making a lot of assumptions that this vendor has their security program in place. Well, they probably don't. And so you can come in and have our security professionals start asking questions to really figure out how much risk do you have with this company. Board level security reporting, all of that would be potentially done. And as well as a security awareness training program. All of those are some key deliverables you should expect to receive from your fractional CISO. So, how do you measure success? You're gonna want metrics. Metrics are a key part of this. Reduction in critical vulnerabilities over time. Have you reduced them? Where we went from here to here. Are they going down? Time to detect and respond to security incidents. Are you you see an incident? Are you responding responding to it quickly? And then one, did you detect it quickly? And then did you respond quickly? Compliance audits, your results and your findings from an audit that you may do with compliance, as well as employee security awareness and how is it working? You have phishing, right? You have people that are phishing you that are going out trying to get, and what I mean by phishing is that's the email phishing piece of this. You have people that are doing email phishing campaigns, and you're trying to figure out are my people clicking on links? Your people are your best asset, but they're also your most risky asset in many ways. So security awareness programs are an imperative part of your overall security plan. Vendor risk assessments, this would be back to what we mentioned earlier about this risk assessments, how are those done, and then what are the scores related to those? And by doing all of these things, it will also help reduce your insurance premiums and your coverage. It will help with all this because that is what the underwriters want. They want to see that you are actually putting things in place to reduce your risk to your company. Now, working with your existing team, your fractional CISO complements your IT. It will not replace them. It provides strategic direction for IT and it bridges the gap between your technical teams and your business leadership. Again, that's that's C that it's that it's that person in the middle. It's that wedge that helps kind of bring both sides together. They also will help mentor your IT staff on many of the security best practices and can potentially help with a lot of retention to keep key people within your company. Because what happens is as they get the security experience, many of these IT people will want to stay if they gain more and more knowledge, which then helps with your overall employee retention. Coordinate with the MSP and your security vendors as well. They're gonna bridge that gap with those folks and then create accountability and governance structure to make as a holistic approach for your organization. Again, cybersecurity is a business critical function. This is key aspects that will help you and your business be successful and grow in the future. Now, there's some common engagement type tools that you can do. The retainer model, right? So this is where it's a fixed monthly hours and it's set up with deliverables that have it. So you have a fixed hours of 10 hours a month you will provide. It can scale up or scale down based on the need, but it's a fixed monthly hours that are set up, a block of time that's there. There's also project base where there's specific initiatives that you may need a security person to help you with. They may be a one to two month aspect, and you will go do that for that one to two to three month aspect. I've done both the retainer models and the project models as well. And so the point of all of those is that they're really a good opportunity depending upon what you might need. Now, the base retainer plus on-call incident response is kind of a hybrid aspect of this. So they have the retainer piece, but then on call incident response, that will kick into a different type of pay structure possibly, or that might be part of the entire package. And then it's scalable, right? So I would recommend if you've never done this before and you're looking into it, start small. Start with a just a small amount of what you're looking for, that it will give you a level of benefit. And then from there, as your program expands or as you get more comfortable with it, then increase the revenue or the program as itself, increase the pay to go into the CISO, this fractional CISO. So again, start small, work your way from there. So ROI beyond just cost savings. So this will reduce your cyber insurance premiums anywhere from 10 to 30% typically by having a CISO on staff. It also can help you avoid your breach costs. Like I said, averages about$3 million. It can help with reducing that. Now, that doesn't mean they won't stop if you get breached, but maybe they take that$3 million and bring it down to, I don't know, a better number, like$200,000. I don't know. But the point of it is that you want to avoid some of those costs that would be associated with a breach. Faster compliance certification, new business opportunities, improved vendor relationships, better business decisions through risk-informed leadership. This comes down to the point you're making risk decisions for your business. If you're a finance person and you're running your company, you understand finance. But most people who understand finance do not understand security. And any, I guess mentioned earlier, cybersecurity is a business critical function. And so why would you put your risk of your company in the hands of somebody that doesn't really understand security? You wouldn't. So you'd want to pull people in that can give you the best guidance. And last bullet is peace of mind for owners and the executives themselves. So here's a real world success story that's out there. Manufacturing company that they had about 150 employees and they did about$50 million in revenue each year. They needed to get to the CMC level two force these Department of Defense or Department of War contracts. They engaged the CISO for 20 hours a month. Okay, so because of doing that, and that CISO helped get them in a position for that. They achieved their certification in nine months and won the$5 million contract, then, and as well as reducing their insurance by up to 25%. So the total investment for that 20 hours a month, right, for that nine months was about$120,000. But in return, they got$5 million in new revenue. So, and on top of that, they reduced their risk to their organization, they reduced their cyber. Insurance. So it's a big benefit that can help you. Again, though, you have to be judicious, you have to pick the right person, and you have to basically give them the ability to do the things they need to do to make your business successful. So here's the integration with cyber insurance. So many insurers now require, like we mentioned, security leadership documentation. They will, the fractional CISA will help complete the detailed applications. I just got done doing one with a large financial carrier going through the questions. And I will tell you there were probably close to 150 very detailed questions that I'm sorry, most people within your organization would not be able to fill out. They would just kind of go and throw something down. The problem is that will not fly with these cyber lead these insurance companies. And on top of that, if you come down and you just throw stuff in there and you have breach of contract with them, that's going to change everything. So the big thing here is these are detailed applications that just most people cannot go out and fill out. Even your IT will IT team would struggle with some of these questions. They implement controls and they reduce premiums. They provide incident response expertise when claims occur. And then they document the security program for better coverage terms. So they're a big factor in your cybersecurity insurance. Without them, that you will have a big problem. I'm just going to be honest. You may have situations where they can do that. I'm not saying they can, but most cases, your security professionals are the ones that need to answer those questions for you. So when to transfer transition to full-time. So your organization reaches about 500 employees and your security budget will exceed over a million dollars annually. If that gets to a position, you're probably going to want to transition to a full-time CISO. You also have a dedicated security team of over three people to your organization. Now, this could incorporate some of your managed service providers. This could do a lot of different things, but if you have multiple people on your team that are security people, you might want to consider having a security leader that helps lead those folks. And then if there's a regulatory requirement that demands on-site daily presence, that would obviously be kind of take you to that next level immediately, right? Your risk profile has dramatically increased. Maybe you got a contract or you are now in a position where you emerged, you had an acquisition, you brought on another company that increased your overall risk. You may want to bring somebody on tight full-time. And your fractional CISO recommends the transition. As a fractional CISO, I would help pick my replacement. I would help you with that if you felt comfortable to do that. So those are all the different pieces that can help you when you're transitioning from a part-time CISO to a full-time individual. So getting started, what are some of the action steps you can do? I know this is a long presentation. There's a lot here, but you know what? This is a big expense. This is a big thing to think about. So you need to assess your current security maturity and gaps. So if you don't have a CISO, think about where are you at? What do I need to do? I've got a risk assessment form on reduced cyber risk you can get access to, and it can help you kind of give you a gauge of where you're at. Define your compliance and regulatory requirements. If you do have regulatory requirements and they do require a security person, let's talk or find somebody that can help you. I can help you find somebody that might give you a better need for your security posture. Establish realistic budget for security leadership. You need to kind of think about it. I've given you some numbers. Start considering that extra money where are you going to get it from? I know margins are tight. It's extremely challenging to come up with money. Figure out how to do something like that. Document your specific needs, risks, and document your specific business needs and the risks to your company. Figure out all of those aspects of it and start putting that down on paper because if you do go to get a fractional CISO, they're going to want to know that information. Interview multiple fractional candidates. I highly recommend you go after a couple. Don't just go after one because you need to find the right person that meets your needs. So look at multiple people to help you with this, right? And if you go through this person and you go, no, I like this person. No, I don't like this person, then you can at least have a better chance of picking the right one. Start with a three to six month pilot engagement. I would recommend to go, you know what, we're not going to bring you on for the two years, but we're going to do, I want a six-month plan with you. This is going to cost X. And I want you to come back and tell me what you would do in the six months to get me to this position. So start with a small engagement. If it works well, then keep it on going. If it doesn't work well, then obviously you just cut your losses and move on. But at a minimum, they should at least get you into a position where you're at least further ahead than you were before. So some questions you need to ask yourself before hiring. What are your most critical assets and data? Where is that at? Where is it stored? What is it? Need to understand that. What compliance frameworks apply to your business? Okay, you need to understand those. What is your current security budget and can it increase? Who will the CISO report to and work with? That's a key candidate, the key thing to come out with. I've started with a company and I'm like, well, you report to this guy. Well, then you report to this guy. Well, then you report to that guy. You need to think about that before you even hire a person because that bouncing around around like a BB in a boxcar or a ping pong ball does not do well with the CISO. Because guess what? The CISO will come in and go, these guys don't have their act together. They're not supporting me. And at the end of that three to six months, the CISO has a right to go, you know what? This just isn't right. I'm sorry, I'd love to help you, but yeah, no, I don't really want to do this anymore. Uh because anytime they do these businesses, they're hanging themselves out there too. So there, there's a you need to figure that part out. It's a key factor. What are the top three security concerns you have right now? What do you feel that you need to get addressed at this point in time immediately? And then are you prepared to implement the recommended changes? You know, are you think about it from a company standpoint? If they come back and say you need to spend X and you need to do this, are you willing to go ahead and go follow through with it? If not, maybe they're not the right person for you. Maybe you're not really ready for a CISO at this moment. And then, but if any of the ones above you say that you are, well, then maybe yeah, you have some hard things to think about. So resources and next steps. Connect with me at contact at reducyberrisk.com and I can answer any questions that you may have. There's also a couple podcasts that are available out there, Reduce Cyber Risk Podcast, as well as CISSP Cyber Trainings Podcast. Those both of those are available. You can go check them out. Uh the Reduce Cyber Risk Podcast is focused on small and medium-sized businesses and helping them secure their organizations. CISSP Cyber Training is designed specifically for individuals that are working on security certifications of the CISP, but it can be of great value to your IT professionals talking about security and helping them get in the mindset to be security professionals themselves. So it's a really good training tool for that. There's also a download at Reduce Cyber Risk for a free security assessment. It can kind of give you the guidelines of where you're at at this moment. And then you can schedule a 30-minute discovery call just to kind of have us figure out where you are at, what do you need, and how can I potentially help you with reduced cyber risk. So again, check it all out. There's all that stuff is available to you at Reduce Cyber Risk or at CISSP Cyber Training. Thank you so much for joining me today. Again, I hope you enjoyed this presentation. If you're looking for a CISO, these are the steps you need to consider. You really need to look hard at this. And this is going to be a great way for you to make a good decision and trying to figure out how to best protect you and your company. Okay, have a great day and we'll catch you on the flip side. See ya. Thanks so much for joining me today on my podcast. If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes as I would greatly appreciate your feedback. Also, check out my videos that are on YouTube. Just head on over to my channel, Reduced Cyber Risk, and you will find a lot of content to help you protect your company from the evil hacker horde. Lastly, head to reduced cyberrisk.com and sign up for my free cybersecurity assessment to provide you guidance around the protection of your organization. Thank you for listening.