Rent-a-Security-Officer

Rent-a-Security-Officer is a fractional or interim CISO engagement — strategic security leadership for organizations that need the function but do not yet justify a full-time hire, or whose CISO seat is temporarily empty.

  flowchart TB
    A[Board / Executive] <-.->|risk reporting| B((Fractional CISO))
    B --> C[Risk register]
    B --> D[Architecture review]
    B --> E[Audit front]
    B --> F[Incident oversight]
    B --> G[Policy work]
    B --> H[Vendor risk]
    F -.-> I[On-call engineers]
    E -.-> J[External auditors]

When this fits

• You are an SMB or scale-up between 30 and 500 staff. Big enough that “the CTO does security on the side” is no longer responsible, small enough that a full-time CISO at €180k+ is not justified.
• You are in a regulated sector (finance, healthcare, defense supply chain, energy) and need a recognized security leader to sign off on policies, attest to controls, and front audits.
• Your CISO seat is vacant — someone left, the search is taking months, and your team still needs cover.
• You are preparing for a board-level certification effort (ISO 27001, SOC 2, TISAX, NIS2 readiness) and want the governance function staffed by someone who has done it before.
• You have just had an incident and the lessons-learned point at a missing leadership function.

What this role covers

A working CISO portfolio, scoped to fractional time:

• Security strategy. Read the business strategy, derive a security strategy that supports it without becoming the brakes.
• Risk management. A real risk register, not a spreadsheet filled out once and forgotten. Quarterly review with the executive team, decisions documented.
• Architecture review. Sit in on architecture decisions with veto rights where it matters. Block what should be blocked; let through what should let through.
• Audit and certification. Front external auditors, manage the evidence collection, translate auditor questions into engineering tasks. Stand behind the result.
• Incident response oversight. Not first-responder duty — oversight. Make sure the response process exists, has been walked through, and the right humans get paged.
• Policy work. Write or refresh the policies that the organization actually needs and will actually follow. Discard the rest.
• Vendor risk. Review vendor contracts and security assertions before they get signed. Push back where pushing back is justified.
• Board and executive reporting. Translate technical posture into business language for the board, monthly or quarterly. Honest, not theatrical.

What you get

• A named individual, not a rotation of consultants. You always know who your CISO is.
• Quarterly written security review that goes to the board or executive team — risk register, recent decisions, planned work, what we recommend funding next.
• Documented decisions. Every material security decision made during the engagement is recorded with rationale. Successors inherit clarity, not folklore.
• A real handover at the end. When the engagement ends — because you have grown into a full-time CISO, or the function is no longer needed — you receive a complete handover packet so nothing is lost.

What sets this apart

• Operator, not auditor. Background in cryptology, secure architecture, and production security — not just frameworks and certifications.
• Pragmatic over theatrical. We will refuse policies that do not match how your organization actually runs. Theatrical compliance gets you audit findings; real controls get you resilience.
• Strategy + technical depth in one head. No handoffs between “the business consultant” and “the technical consultant”. The Pronix dual-founder structure means business framing and engineering depth sit together.
• No vendor referral bias. We do not get kickbacks from security vendors. Recommendations are based on fit, not margin.

Why this matters at the CEO level

• 💰 The protected asset is the business. Information assets — customer data, intellectual property, operational systems — are a significant share of enterprise value in any modern organization. The function that protects them is a board-level concern, not an IT-operations afterthought.
• 🔥 Breach economics. A material breach costs €3–5M on average in direct cost, plus reputational damage that takes years to recover from. The CISO function is what keeps that probability low.
• ⚖️ Personal liability. Under NIS2 and similar frameworks, senior management in regulated sectors can be held personally liable for inadequate cyber governance. Having a named, qualified CISO is not optional anymore.
• 🛡️ Insurance and audits. Cyber-insurance carriers increasingly require attested CISO oversight at named-individual level. So do many enterprise customers during vendor onboarding.
• 🚀 Strategic enablement. AI adoption, cloud migration, new customer channels — they all succeed or stall on the security review. Without that function, initiatives either don’t launch or launch with hidden liability.

Engagement format

• Typical duration. 3 to 18 months, renewable.
• Cadence. 1 to 4 days per month, plus on-call windows for incidents (separately scoped).
• Onboarding. Two-week ramp-up (~5 days condensed) to read the environment, meet the key stakeholders, and produce a first-impressions document.
• Pricing. Fixed monthly retainer based on agreed cadence and incident-coverage tier. No time-and-materials drift.
• Geographic. Remote-first. Quarterly onsite presence where useful and budget allows.

Reach out and we will scope what fractional-CISO coverage your organization actually needs.