Digital Velocity

The growing number of sophisticated cyber-attacks underlines that no business is too small to be targeted. For startups and SMBs, a CISO’s expert guidance becomes an indispensable asset to navigate the direct realworld implications impacting business operations and public safety. Many C-suite leaders need an executive-level advisor—a CISO—who can speak the language of the board and provide an overview of major and minor risks. This is crucial for deploying the right levels of security controls and governance. However, the financial commitment required for a full-time CISO (combining salary and bonus) makes it difficult to find the right talent. A limited talent pool and lengthy recruitment processes add to the challenges for startups and SMBs.

Digital Velocity offers a solution to these challenges by providing top-tier Virtual CISO (vCISO) services for midmarket organizations and startups. It has a team of experts who have, on average, five years of experience serving as CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs in various organizations across different industries. The company is renowned for its interpersonal skills and has business credentials outside the standard cybersecurity certifications. This, coupled with its expertise in solving time-critical security scenarios, makes Digital Velocity a perfect choice for organizations of all sizes.

Rick Rowley, CISO and principal architect of Digital Velocity, sums up its vCISOs’ professional brilliance: “vCISOs are masters of response and are prepared to take on the burden of certifying enterprise trust and mitigating risk.”

Matching Maverick Individuals with Companies

To cater to every company’s distinct cybersecurity risk profile and security maturity level, Digital Velocity offers an on-demand service model to help organizations find the right fit (fractional or highly engaged) for their needs. It has developed a proprietary role requirements and definition process to gain a clear understanding of a client’s existing security posture. The insights gleaned are instrumental in targeting and filtering seasoned professionals better suited for those particularities. The result is a carefully vetted professional who can wear multiple hats, such as a security architect, policy enforcer, auditor, coach, and strong communicator when needed.

Whether strategic security consulting, ethical hacking to identify vulnerabilities, or establishing rigorous security protocols, these experts leave no stone unturned to bring a client’s cybersecurity posture to par excellence. Digital Velocity’s vCISOs can pivot to resolve various scenarios, including providing a mature response to security breaches, corporate espionage, and cyberwarfare. Leaning on their industry know-how and real-world experience, the company offers clients a high-level roadmap called Navigator for implementing cybersecurity policies, procedures, and security architecture effectively.
vCISOs collaborate with the in-house information security (InfoSec) team to prioritize tasks that drive organizational growth and ensure compliance. The goal is to break down complex compliance requirements and translate them into InfoSec policies or processes, making them useful, intuitive, and simple for the board.

“As CISOs, we prioritize understanding an organization’s threat landscape, their workforce’s human behavior, and regulatory requirements while gaining the trust of stakeholders. This gives us a comprehensive view of the client’s business, technology, risk, and legal landscape, enabling us to connect the dots in a valuable way,” says Rowley.

Multi-dimensional Approach, Multiple Advantages

Digital Velocity’s on-demand vCISO model allows clients to reduce onboarding and administrative costs by 45 to 55 percent compared to a full-time CISO. Its lightweight placements and recruitment process assure a shorter onboarding time, which outweighs the industry’s standard span of six months. Clients can reduce spending time and resources on hefty benefits packages to improve retention rates.

Another key benefit is that organizations can receive unbiased and impartial feedback free from conflicts of interest on the organization’s security infrastructure during a security breach or any privacy issue. vCISO’s opinions and recommendations help clients focus on appropriate remediation measures and enforce guardrails that can preempt future instances.

Digital Velocity has demonstrated its proficiency through many client collaborations. For instance, a leading investment and advisory firm in New York recently turned to Digital Velocity for urgent support following a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) examination that uncovered critical gaps in their governance, technology, and incident response strategies. Faced with a tight deadline for rectification, Digital Velocity swiftly onboarded a CISO well-versed in the finance industry to act as the security advisor and guide the remediation efforts. Digital Velocity’s vCISO comprehensively reviewed the InfoSec program and developed a robust plan in alignment with SEC regulations, pinpointing vulnerabilities and enhancing the firm’s cyber defenses. This preemptive strategy ensured regulatory compliance and protected the client’s operations while meeting the stringent timeline.

Employee-centric Security Awareness Programs

Having worked with multiple clients across different domains, Digital Velocity acknowledges that the weakest link often lies in the human part of the ‘people, process, and technology’ equation. Technologically advanced protection fails when employees use weak passwords on work-related devices or fall for phishing scams.
Historically, awareness programs built on security-based training services have retained employee education as a prime focus. However, these programs are ad hoc with minimal reporting and measuring mechanisms.

Digital Velocity, to this end, encourages organizations to develop security awareness programs centered on measurable human behavior rather than compliance-based training. It is taking steps to re-scope security awareness programs specific to employees’ responsibilities. The company weaves insights from user experience design, behavioral science, corporate psychology, and related disciplines to empower employees to make secure and conscious decisions. Its targeted programs and role-based learning experiences prevail over baseline compliance-focused initiatives.

The Security Partner for Tomorrow’s Digital Front

For Digital Velocity, providing comprehensive cybersecurity protection goes hand in hand with continuous improvement to stay attuned to the industry’s dynamic nature. It invests in training and development to keep its vCISO team updated and prepared to meet industry demands. This step is crucial to help organizations reach their desired level of information security while ensuring a competitive advantage in today’s world.

Particularly with new technologies like Gen AI entering all avenues of organizations, Digital Velocity emphasizes finding ways to better integrate security and governance into business operations to create a culture of security consciousness among employees. The AI race, after all, is the modern-day gold rush as enterprises start using LLMs for different use cases. The steep adoption curves and positive outcomes will do little to dispel the security concerns evident in under-tested models. Organizations must ensure the protection of their intellectual properties and business-critical data assets. They are discovering that there is no AI strategy without a robust and agile data foundation.

“A good amount of imminent risks can be prevented by implementing an acceptable use policy, helping employees differentiate between risk-prone activities and safer ones,” says Rowley.

Digital Velocity is gearing up to help organizations develop AI governance programs based on available frameworks. The goal is to pave a secure path for integrating Gen AI into business processes and workflows. Finding third-party partners to embed best practices and conducting regular inspections are also part of the initiative to assess progress and track the right balance between supervised and unsupervised use of AI. The company emphasizes that the success rate of AI initiatives will increase exponentially when organizations combine a mature security model, effective data management capabilities, and a robust architecture. All these initiatives are centered on helping clients stay vigilant in the ever-evolving digital-first business landscape.

With new regulations like the upcoming European Union AI Act, companies across the board are on a perpetual search for tenured vCISOs, business security officers (BSOs), and deputy CISOs to foster greater awareness and understanding of their cyber risk profiles. Digital Velocity’s team of experts with experience in taking a business-oriented and risk-based approach is well-positioned to address and guide clients in their cybersecurity journey.