Virtual CISO (vCISO) Services
Part of Advisory Services, alongside IT Strategy & Virtual CIO Services.
A Virtual CISO is the person who owns security decisions when nobody on staff does. TTS Cyber takes that role for lean teams, covering certification work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and CMMC alongside vendor and third-party risk, incident response, and the security reporting that goes to an insurer or a board.
What is Compliance-as-a-Service?
Compliance-as-a-Service (CaaS) is the certification side of a Virtual CISO engagement, delivered as ongoing work instead of a one-off project. It runs from a gap analysis through evidence tracking, control maintenance, and renewals, for SOC 2, ISO 27001, or CMMC.
SOC 2 is an attestation performed by an independent CPA firm under AICPA standards. ISO 27001 is a standard a buyer asks you to certify against, which is why the deadline belongs to the buyer asking for it. Neither is imposed by a regulator.
TTS Cyber is not a CPA firm and does not issue SOC 2 reports. The work here is getting a company ready for one and keeping it ready between examinations.
What does a vCISO do when there’s no audit coming?
Most of the security questions that reach a small company arrive with no audit attached, and a Virtual CISO engagement covers three of them.
Vendor and third-party risk review is an accounting of who outside your company can reach your data and what they can do with it. The review is all of these:
- Reading the security posture of the suppliers you depend on.
- Answering the security questionnaires your customers send.
- Issuing them to vendors when you are the buyer.
The failure here is quiet. Access granted for one project stays live long after the project ends, a supplier gets breached, and the first anyone learns of the connection is when somebody uses it.
Incident response ownership means one person is accountable for the plan before anything happens, runs the response when something does, and writes up afterwards what happened and what changed because of it. Where nobody owns that, the plan is a document written once and never read again, and the decisions get made at speed by whoever is nearest the problem.
Reporting to insurers or a board turns all of that into something a non-technical reader can act on. A cyber insurer asks specific questions at renewal and prices the answers, so every yes needs something behind it. A board or an ownership group is asking whether the risk is moving in the right direction and what the spending bought. Without that reporting, security reaches the people who fund it only after an incident.
How does an engagement work?
An engagement starts with a gap analysis: what you have now, against what the framework, the buyer, or the insurer expects. That produces a list of what is missing and what needs evidence behind it.
From there the work is ongoing. Controls get maintained as the environment changes. Evidence gets tracked as it is generated, instead of being reconstructed from scratch ahead of an examination. The internal people who own pieces of it get support, and renewals get handled before they turn into a scramble.
Scope is set by how much of that your own team already covers. Some companies have a capable person doing security part-time and need direction and a second opinion. Others have nobody, and the vCISO holds the whole thing.
What does staying compliant get you?
The most immediate return is time back from your own people. Evidence collection, questionnaire answers, and control checks otherwise land on whoever is least able to refuse them, usually an engineer or an office manager.
The second return is commercial. A certification a buyer asked for removes a reason for that buyer to stall, and the same evidence answers a cyber insurer at renewal and a customer’s security review.
Continuity matters more than any single audit date. Controls drift as staff change and systems get replaced. The ongoing support exists so that drift gets caught while it is still small, whether you are heading into a first examination or holding a certification you already have.
What is a Virtual CISO?
A Virtual CISO, or vCISO, is an outside security leader who takes on the responsibilities of an in-house Chief Information Security Officer (compliance, risk, and data protection) for businesses that need that leadership but don’t need, or can’t yet justify, a full-time executive.
At TTS Cyber that is the whole role, which is all of these:
- Certification work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and CMMC.
- Review of the vendors and third parties who hold your data.
- Ownership of the incident response plan.
- The security reporting that goes to an insurer or a board.
What’s included
- Personalized gap analysis
- Strategic assessments
- Evidence tracking
- Control maintenance support
- Internal team support
- Streamlined renewals
- Ongoing audit readiness
- Vendor and third-party risk review
- Incident response plan ownership
- Reporting for insurers and boards
What it’s for
- Reduce internal compliance workload
- Build credibility with enterprise buyers
- Know who outside your company can reach your data
- Put a named owner on the incident response plan
- Give an insurer or a board security reporting they can act on
Frameworks and standards covered
- SOC 2
- ISO 27001
- CMMC
Who this is for
- Startups and scale-ups
- Lean and fast-moving teams
- Companies selling to enterprise buyers
Frequently Asked Questions
Which compliance frameworks does TTS Cyber support?
TTS Cyber supports SOC 2, ISO 27001, and CMMC, from an initial gap analysis through evidence tracking and ongoing renewals.
Does TTS Cyber hold these certifications itself?
TTS Cyber has completed its own SOC 2 Type II examination. An independent CPA firm performs that examination, checking TTS Cyber’s own controls across a period of time, and issues the report. That fact is about SOC 2 only and does not extend to ISO 27001 or CMMC. Helping clients work toward SOC 2, ISO 27001 or CMMC is a separate matter from holding any of them.
How is a Virtual CISO engagement different from a full-time compliance hire?
A Virtual CISO engagement gives you the same gap-analysis-to-audit-readiness work, scaled to how much support your team actually needs, without the cost and lead time of a full-time hire.
Our cyber insurance renewal came with a security questionnaire our IT provider can’t answer. Who is supposed to fill it out?
The signature on that questionnaire belongs to the insured, so the answers do too, while the evidence behind them comes from whoever runs the systems. Each yes is a written representation the insurer relied on in pricing the risk. That is why a control claimed on the form but absent in practice is a recognized route to a denied claim. Artifacts settle that better than reassurance: the multifactor enforcement policy with its exception list, an endpoint detection and response coverage report measured against a real device inventory, and the date, systems and outcome of the most recent restore test.
Where nobody can produce those, 30 to 60 days before renewal is the usual runway, and every answer that cannot be substantiated is a project rather than a wording problem. That gap-and-evidence work is what a virtual CISO engagement is built for.
An IT provider told us they’re SOC 2. Does that mean they hold the certification, or that they help clients get it?
Ask them which, and get the answer in writing, because there is a meaningful difference between a provider who holds a certification and one who helps clients achieve one. Both are valuable and neither substitutes for the other. Only the first is something you can pass along as evidence to your own auditor or enterprise customer. A provider who blurs the two is telling you something about how they will describe other things later.
For reference, TTS Cyber’s Virtual CISO service takes clients through SOC 2, ISO 27001 and CMMC, from an initial gap analysis through evidence tracking and ongoing renewals. That describes the service TTS Cyber delivers. Separately, and as a fact about TTS Cyber rather than about that service, TTS Cyber has completed its own SOC 2 Type II examination.
Related services
Cyber Security Solutions
Security in layers, so a threat one control misses can still be caught by the next. It covers your data, systems and network, and aims to prevent, detect and respond to threats.
IT Strategy & Virtual CIO Services
Senior IT planning help without hiring a full-time executive. You get a written IT roadmap and quarterly planning meetings, with guidance on budget and risk.
Further reading
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