SECURITY STRATEGY + PRIORITIES
- Establish or sharpen security strategy
- Translate business objectives and risk into security priorities
- Build practical roadmaps
- Help leadership make informed trade-offs
- Bring structure to competing security demands
FRACTIONAL CISO FOR TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES.
Senior security leadership without another full-time executive hire.
Get experienced security leadership to set direction, challenge assumptions, work with your leadership team, and help turn security priorities into something the business can act on.
Sometimes called a virtual CISO or vCISO, a Fractional CISO gives you access to experienced security leadership without requiring a full-time CISO role.
WHEN DOES A FRACTIONALCISO MAKE SENSE?
Not every company needs a full-time CISO. That doesn’t mean security leadership can simply be left unowned.
These are the situations where bringing in a Fractional CISO usually earns its place.
Security has grown beyond what the CTO or technical leadership can reasonably own alongside everything else.
Customers, partners, investors, or the board are asking harder security questions.
Security activity exists, but there is no clear strategy or prioritisation.
The company is growing and security decisions are becoming more consequential.
Compliance activity is happening, but the business needs security leadership beyond passing an audit.
The organisation needs experienced security leadership while deciding whether or when to make a permanent CISO hire.
Existing security teams need senior direction, challenge, or executive representation.
WHAT DOES A FRACTIONAL CISO DO?
The exact remit depends on the business, but the role is about owning security direction rather than arriving with a generic checklist.
Engagements are shaped around what the organisation actually needs, so not every engagement covers every area below.
EXECUTIVE + BOARD SECURITY LEADERSHIP
- Give leadership an experienced security voice
- Support board and executive conversations
- Translate technical risk into business context
- Challenge assumptions and provide independent perspective
- Help communicate priorities, decisions, and progress clearly
SECURITY OPERATIONS + CAPABILITY
- Review how security is organised and operated
- Provide senior direction to internal teams and suppliers
- Identify operational gaps and improvement priorities
- Support SOC, monitoring, detection, and response strategy where relevant
- Help determine where capability should be built internally, bought, or changed
INCIDENT READINESS + RESILIENCE
- Review incident readiness and escalation
- Clarify roles, decision-making, and response expectations
- Pressure-test resilience and response plans
- Support leadership preparation for serious security incidents
- Bring experience from real-world incident environments into planning
CUSTOMERS, ASSURANCE + GROWTH
- Support security conversations with customers and partners
- Help leadership respond to increasing security expectations
- Bring security into commercial decisions without turning it into a blocker
- Support security positioning during growth, transformation, or major customer activity
SECURITY LEADERSHIP, NOT SECURITY THEATRE.
A Fractional CISO should help the business make better security decisions.
That means understanding what matters, what genuinely reduces risk, where investment is justified, and where activity is creating noise rather than progress.
The goal isn’t to make security look busy. It’s to give it direction.
EXPERIENCE THAT SURVIVES CONTACT WITH REALITY.
- SECURITY TEAMS OF 50–60 PEOPLE
- Built and led large multidisciplinary security teams, with responsibility extending beyond the technology to the people and operating model around it.
- £100M+ PROGRAMMES AND BUDGETS
- Led programmes and held budget responsibility at £100m+ scale, bringing security decisions into the wider reality of enterprise investment, priorities, and delivery.
- SOC TRANSFORMATION
- Transformed a part-time SOC into a full-time security operation, building the people, processes, and capability needed to operate around the clock.
- CRITICAL NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
- Built and transformed security operations in complex CNI and OT / ICS environments, where resilience, regulation, and operational reality all have a seat at the table.
- RANSOMWARE AND NATION-STATE INCIDENTS
- Led through ransomware and nation-state attacks at global-enterprise scale, putting incident plans, operational capability, and leadership judgement to work under pressure.
- BOARD AND EXECUTIVE ADVISORY
- Worked with boards and executive teams on security strategy, monitoring, and large-enterprise security operations, translating technical risk into business terms.
Advice from operating in complex security environments, not consulting about them.
HOW DOES AN ENGAGEMENT WORK?
Fractional CISO is an ongoing leadership engagement rather than a fixed diagnostic or a one-off assessment.
The shape is agreed with you, and it changes as the business and the security position change.
UNDERSTAND
Start with the business, current security position, priorities, constraints, and what leadership needs from the role.
PRIORITISE
Establish what matters most, what needs attention now, and what can wait.
LEAD
Work with leadership, internal teams, suppliers, and other stakeholders to move the agreed priorities forward.
REVIEW + ADAPT
Keep priorities aligned as the business, threat environment, customers, and security capability change.
FRACTIONAL CISO, vCISO, CONSULTANT, OR FULL-TIME CISO?
These models solve different problems. None of them is universally better than the others, so the useful question is which one matches the ownership your business needs right now.
- FRACTIONAL CISO
- Ongoing senior security leadership embedded into the business for part of the time. Appropriate where the organisation needs CISO-level ownership and direction without a full-time executive role.
- VIRTUAL CISO / vCISO
- Often used as another name for fractional or outsourced CISO services, and terminology varies across providers. Cyber Increment uses Fractional CISO because the engagement is centred on active senior leadership and involvement in the business.
- SECURITY CONSULTANT
- Usually brought in to solve or advise on a defined security problem or project. Useful when specialist expertise is required but ongoing security leadership is not.
- FULL-TIME CISO
- A permanent executive responsible for security leadership. Appropriate when the scale, complexity, regulatory environment, team, and workload justify a dedicated full-time role.
DO YOU NEED A FULL-TIME CISO?
Possibly. Fractional leadership isn’t automatically the right long-term answer.
A company may reach the point where the scale of the organisation, security team, regulatory exposure, customer expectations, or workload justify a permanent CISO.
A Fractional CISO can provide leadership before that point, and can also help establish what the permanent role needs to look like when the time comes.
YOUR FRACTIONAL CISO.
DAVID McKENZIE
25+ years of cybersecurity experience, much of it spent making security work when the environment is complex and the stakes are real.
Dave has built and transformed security operations, led large multidisciplinary teams, worked across enterprise, CNI, and managed security, and held responsibility for programmes and budgets at £100m+ scale.
His experience spans the strategy room and the operational floor, including board and executive security advisory, and leading through ransomware, nation-state attacks, and major incidents.
NEED SOMEONE TO OWN SECURITY?
Tell us what's happening, where security sits today, and what you need from the role. We'll work out whether Fractional CISO support makes sense.