Cybersecurity Consulting & Compliance for Mid-Market Companies

Cybersecurity consulting is the practice of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating security and compliance risks in your environment — and standing up the controls, processes, and governance that prevent the next round of risks from becoming incidents. Mid-market companies have the same threat surface as enterprises (regulated data, employee endpoints, cloud workloads, third-party integrations) with a fraction of the headcount and budget. That mismatch is the whole problem this practice exists to solve.

What you actually get

Our cybersecurity work breaks into five engagement types. Most clients start with one and add others as the security program matures.

Cybersecurity risk assessment. A structured four-to-six-week review of your security posture against a recognized framework (NIST CSF, CIS Controls, ISO 27001, or a framework your industry requires). We produce a prioritized list of risks with specific remediations, cost and effort estimates for each, and a sequenced roadmap. Not a 200-page report that nobody reads. A working document your IT leadership can act on.

Fractional CISO / virtual CISO engagements. For mid-market companies that need executive security leadership but cannot justify a full-time CISO hire, we provide a senior security leader on a part-time retainer. Typical engagements run ten to thirty hours per month and cover security strategy, board reporting, vendor risk reviews, incident response leadership, and policy development. The person you work with has actually held CISO or equivalent roles in environments of similar size.

Compliance readiness and audit support. SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 readiness engagements. We work alongside your team to implement the required controls, collect evidence, prepare for the auditor, and get you through the audit. Engagement scope ranges from “we are six months out and want to run it ourselves with guidance” to “we have thirty days and need hands-on help.” Pricing reflects scope accordingly.

Penetration testing and security assessments. Application penetration testing, network penetration testing, cloud configuration review, and social engineering assessments. Reports include executive summary for leadership, technical findings for the engineering team, and reproducible proof-of-concept exploits. Retesting after remediation is included for findings in the original scope.

Managed security services and incident response support. For organizations that need ongoing security monitoring and response but are too small for a full SOC, we can either operate the security function or advise the MSSP you use. Incident response engagements are handled either as a retainer or on a case-by-case basis for organizations without a retainer.

Who this is for

Mid-market companies are the underserved segment in cybersecurity consulting. Enterprise firms (Big Four, the global consultancies) price their work for Fortune 1000 budgets and staff engagements with junior teams. Commodity MSPs and MSSPs will run a vulnerability scan and call it an assessment. Boutique security firms are often excellent but focus on specific verticals or niches. Mid-market IT leaders get squeezed in the middle.

We are a fit if you:

• Have between roughly one hundred and fifteen hundred employees and are processing regulated or sensitive data — customer PII, protected health information, cardholder data, intellectual property, or similar.
• Need to move on compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, ISO) because a customer, investor, or regulator is requiring it.
• Have had a security incident, a near-miss, or a board member asking harder questions than you can currently answer.
• Want senior security expertise without signing a long-term managed services contract.

We are not a fit if:

• You are a Fortune 500 needing global compliance coordination across dozens of subsidiaries. Big Four is the right call.
• You are looking for the cheapest possible checkbox compliance service. There are firms that will rubber-stamp you through a SOC 2 audit for a low fee, and the audit report will be worthless. We are not that service.

How the work runs

Every engagement starts with a scoping conversation. Security work in particular cannot be scoped accurately without understanding your actual environment, so we will ask questions. After that:

Risk assessment engagements begin with documentation review and stakeholder interviews (IT, compliance, legal, whoever owns business risk), followed by technical evidence collection (configuration exports, control validation, sample testing), followed by analysis and a written deliverable. Three to six weeks from kickoff to final report depending on environment complexity.

Fractional CISO engagements start with a thirty-day baseline: we learn your environment, your board, your existing controls, your vendors, your incidents, and your risks. After that, the retainer rhythm is typically a weekly leadership check-in, a monthly risk review, and quarterly board-ready reporting. We are reachable for incidents in between.

Penetration tests have a defined scope, timeline, and rules of engagement that we agree on before testing begins. Typical engagements run one to three weeks of active testing plus reporting. Retesting of remediated findings is included.

Compliance readiness varies most by starting position. Organizations with mature IT controls and documentation can often be SOC 2 ready in three to four months. Organizations starting from scratch usually need six to nine. We will not sandbag the timeline to sell you more hours, and we will not undersell the timeline to close the deal.

What this costs

Cybersecurity engagements are priced by scope, not hourly. A risk assessment for a mid-market organization lands in a defensible range we will tell you during scoping. Fractional CISO retainers are priced by monthly hour commitment. Penetration tests are priced by scope (number of applications, network ranges, or scenarios). Compliance engagements depend on your starting position.

What we can tell you: we are significantly less expensive than the Big Four for equivalent scope. We are more expensive than commodity checkbox compliance vendors. The cost-per-risk-remediated is typically the honest comparison, and on that measure we are usually a better deal than either alternative.

The three mistakes mid-market companies keep making

Worth flagging because we see these on nearly every new engagement.

First, treating security as a compliance exercise. If your security program exists to satisfy an auditor, your actual attack surface is wide open. Compliance frameworks are minimums, not goals. The companies that get breached are almost always compliant on paper.

Second, buying tools instead of building processes. A new endpoint detection and response tool does not help if nobody is watching the alerts. A new SIEM does not help if the ingestion is misconfigured. Tools are roughly ten percent of a security program. Processes, people, and governance are the rest.

Third, assuming the cloud vendor handles security. The shared responsibility model is real. AWS, Azure, and GCP secure the underlying infrastructure. Everything inside your account — IAM, configuration, data, workloads, network rules — is your responsibility. The majority of cloud security incidents at mid-market scale come from misconfiguration inside the customer’s control, not from platform-level failures.

Engagement archetypes

The engagement archetypes linked below describe the specific shapes of security work this practice is built to execute. Each is a representative engagement profile, not a disclosure of individual past clients.

• HIPAA audit readiness on a 90-day timeline. Healthcare technology company with existing HIPAA controls that have drifted, scheduled audit, enterprise-customer revenue conditional on a clean report.
• SOC 2 readiness plus independent security assessment. Financial services or SaaS firm in SOC 2 renewal cycle needing both compliance readiness and a third-party penetration test to validate controls.
• Incident response into fractional CISO transition. Organization that has experienced a near-miss (or actual incident), needs immediate senior-level response, then a transition into ongoing fractional CISO coverage.

Frequently asked questions

What framework do you assess against?

The framework that fits your business. NIST CSF is our most common default for companies that have not yet picked one. Regulated industries usually come with a framework already prescribed (HIPAA Security Rule for healthcare, PCI DSS for card processors, industry-specific frameworks for financial services). We are happy to assess against multiple frameworks where obligations overlap.

Can you help us get SOC 2 certified?

We can help you get SOC 2 ready and support you through the audit. The actual SOC 2 report is issued by a licensed CPA firm — we are not that firm. We can partner with audit firms you already use, and we can recommend qualified firms if you do not already have a relationship.

What is the difference between a fractional CISO and a virtual CISO?

In practice, nothing consistent. Both terms describe a senior security leader engaged on a fractional basis rather than full-time. Some firms use “virtual” to mean remote-only; we are remote-only either way. We use “fractional” internally because it is more honest about the nature of the engagement — a share of a senior leader’s time, not a full CISO.

We had an incident. Can you help right now?

Yes. If you are in an active incident, call the main number or email the emergency contact listed on our contact page. We take incident response engagements on a first-available basis. If you are not in an active incident but want to prepare for one, an incident response retainer or a tabletop exercise engagement is the right call.

Do you work with specific industries?

Our practice is built for mid-market companies across healthcare technology, financial services, SaaS, and manufacturing — the sectors where our methodology fits most cleanly. We engage across other sectors as well. Industry fit matters less than organizational fit — a healthcare company with a mature IT function looks a lot like a fintech with a mature IT function from the security-consulting side.

How do you handle findings that expose our team or leadership?

Professionally and confidentially. Risk assessment findings sometimes point to decisions that specific people made, and those findings need to be communicated in a way that is useful rather than accusatory. We write reports that focus on the gap and the remediation, not on assigning blame. If there is a hard conversation that needs to happen, we will have it — that is part of what senior security consulting looks like.

Do you resell security tools?

No. We do not have reseller agreements with any security vendor. Tool recommendations in our reports reflect what we believe fits your environment, not what pays us a commission. If you ask us about a specific tool, we will give you a direct opinion.

What is the smallest engagement you will take?

A scoping conversation. Beyond that, a single-application penetration test or a focused risk assessment on a specific domain (cloud, identity, vendor risk) is often a good first engagement. Not every first conversation needs to be about a full-program assessment.

Ready to get a security assessment scoped? Book a discovery call.