You Don't Need a Fortune 500 Budget to Run a Real Security Program

How we help small and mid-size companies build, deploy, and manage a complete information security program — framework, owners, first assessment, and month-to-month operation — without a full-time CISO. A 40 person accounting firm called us in March, three weeks after their largest client sent over a two page security questionnaire as a condition of renewal. The managing partner had filled out most of it by guessing. He was honest about it: "I checked 'yes' on things I hoped were true." That is not a character flaw. It is what happens when a business with real revenue and real client data has never been asked to prove any of it before, and suddenly is. There is a myth that a security program is something only large enterprises can afford, that you need a CISO earning $280,000, a security operations center, and a compliance team before you can say you take this seriously. In our engagements with businesses under a couple hundred employees, that myth does more damage than any single misconfiguration. It convinces owners that the choice is between an expensive program and no program, so they pick no program and hope. What we actually build with those clients costs a fraction of a single full time hire, and it holds up under a client audit, a cyber insurance application, and, occasionally, an incident. Pick a framework that fits the company you actually are The first mistake we untang