You already have people doing security. Backstop Cyber puts senior capability behind them — vCISO leadership, audit readiness, risk assessment — scoped to the deadline in front of you and no larger.
The situation
The teams we work with are not making obvious mistakes. They are making reasonable trade-offs, every day, with less time than the work requires.
Your infrastructure got more complex, your customers got more demanding, and your security scope quietly tripled. Headcount did not. The people holding it together are good at their jobs — there are simply not enough hours in a week to both do the work and prove the work.
A customer contract, an insurer, or a regulator has put a date on the calendar. Somebody now owns evidence collection, policy gaps, and a control set they did not design — on top of the job they already had.
Alerts, security questionnaires, vendor reviews and a backlog of findings all arrive at the same priority. Without someone whose job is to rank them against real risk, the loudest item wins — and the loudest item is rarely the most important one.
Services
Five engagements. Each one is written down before it starts, scoped to end, and built so your team can run what is left behind.
S-01
A senior security leader on your team for a defined number of hours each month. We own the security roadmap, sit in the meetings where risk decisions actually get made, translate technical exposure into language a board, an insurer or an enterprise customer will accept, and give your engineers a named person to escalate to. This is not an advisory retainer that produces slide decks — it is accountability for outcomes you agree on in writing before the engagement starts.
S-02
SOC 2, HIPAA, CMMC, PCI DSS and ISO 27001. We work backward from your audit date: scope the control set, run a gap assessment before the auditor does, write policies that survive scrutiny rather than templates that do not, stand up evidence collection so it becomes a by-product of normal operations instead of a quarterly fire drill, and run a readiness dry-run against the actual criteria. We are not your auditor and cannot be — we are the team that makes the audit uneventful.
S-03
A structured look at what could actually hurt you, ranked. We inventory what you run, where the data lives, who can reach it, and what the realistic failure modes are — then hand you a prioritised risk register with owners, effort estimates, and a defensible rationale for the things you have consciously chosen not to fix yet. Mapped to NIST CSF or whichever framework your customers ask about, so the output is reusable in questionnaires, renewals and insurance applications.
S-04
The unglamorous foundation, built properly: asset and identity inventory, an access review cadence that actually happens, logging and detection somebody reads, vulnerability management with an SLA attached, backups you have tested by restoring them, and an incident plan that names people rather than roles which no longer exist. We build it with your team, document it as we go, and hand it over.
S-05
A pre-negotiated agreement so that the worst day is not also the day you go shopping for help. We hold your environment context, contacts and escalation path in advance, commit to a response window ([FILL: your response SLA]), and run tabletop exercises so the plan has been rehearsed by the people who will have to use it. When something happens you make one call and we are already oriented.
Engagement
Three steps. No discovery phase that bills for six weeks before anything useful happens.
We spend the first call on your situation rather than our capabilities: what is due, who owns it today, what has already been tried, and what happens if the date slips. You leave with an honest read on whether you need us at all. Sometimes the answer is one more hire or a tool you already pay for — we will say so.
You get the specific deliverables, who does what, the hours or the fixed fee, the assumptions we are making, and the date the engagement ends. No open-ended retainer that quietly becomes permanent. If the scope needs to change, that is a conversation first and an invoice second.
We work in your tools, in your meetings, with your people, documenting as we go. The measure of a good engagement is that your team can run what we built without us. When the scope is delivered we say so and stop — continuing is a decision you make, not a default that happens.
Fit
We would rather lose an hour here than three months on a bad fit. If the right-hand column describes you, we are not the right call and will tell you so on the first one.
Frameworks
We prepare organisations for these programs and operate inside them. Backstop Cyber is not an auditor, an assessor, or a certifying body, and does not present itself as one.
Contact
Send the shape of the problem and the date attached to it. A person reads every message that comes through this form and replies to it — there is no sequence, no drip, and nothing is added to a list.