CyberWave

Managed vCISO

Someone accountable in the room, without hiring a CISO.

You have a board asking who owns security, an insurer asking who signs off on risk, and a customer asking for a name. A named CyberWave advisor works inside your own Sentinel workspace, on a cadence, and leaves you with decisions that have dates on them.

Talk to usCompare the three

An engagement starts with a conversation, not a checkout. Only need the platform? Start your 14-day free trial

Advisory
$999/mo
Managed vCISO Lite — published price
Deeper
From $2,499/mo
Managed vCISO — scoped with you
Advisor seat
0 users
Not one of your Managed vCISO Lite users

Most companies this size do not need a CISO. They need the decisions a CISO would have made.

A fractional advisor is not a discount on a security leader. It is a way to get the decisions made, recorded and dated in a company that will not have a full-time security executive for years — if ever.

Three commitments

One platform, one published advisory subscription, one scoped engagement.

They are not three sizes of the same thing. The first is software your team operates. The second adds a named person on a fixed cadence, which is why it can carry a public price. The third varies with your board cycle, so it is scoped rather than guessed at here.

Managed vCISO Lite
What it is
Full Platform plus a named CyberWave advisor on a scheduled advisory cadence.
Who runs the programme
Your team, with a named CyberWave advisor alongside them.
Cadence
Scheduled sessions, with the agenda drawn from your register.
Price
$999/month · $11,388.60/year
Included users
5 users — the advisor is not one of them
Trial
No trial — a cadence cannot be sampled in a fortnight
How it starts
Talk to us
Managed vCISO
What it is
A deeper engagement, scoped to your programme, governance calendar and stakeholders.
Who runs the programme
Your team, with deeper advisory hours and support for owning the governance calendar.
Cadence
Agreed in the statement of work, including board and stakeholder engagement.
Price
From $2,499/month, agreed with the hours
Included users
Agreed in the statement of work
Trial
No trial — scoped first
How it starts
Talk to us

All figures are USD and the same as the pricing page — there is no advisory rate card that appears only after a call. Essentials at $99/month sits below all three and carries no advisory component. Engagements are governed by the statement of work and the professional services terms.

What the service is

Five things arrive. None of them is a strategy document.

The category’s vocabulary is interchangeable — advisory, guidance, leadership as a service — which is how nobody can tell two offers apart. Here is what is actually delivered, in people, calendars and artefacts.

  1. 01

    A named advisor

    One person who learns your environment and stays with it. Not a shared inbox, not whoever is free that week. An insurer, a board and a customer all eventually ask for a name.

  2. 02

    A cadence in the calendar

    Sessions booked ahead, not when something goes wrong. The agenda comes out of your workspace: what moved, what expired, what is overdue, what needs a decision.

  3. 03

    Risk decisions, recorded

    Your risk register gets worked through with you rather than admired once a year. Accept, fund, defer — each decision gets an owner and a date, in the register, so six months later you can see what was decided and whether it happened.

  4. 04

    Help with the report

    The executive page and the board pack, prepared with you rather than delivered to you. You present it; your advisor helps you build it and gets you ready for the questions.

  5. 05

    A governance calendar

    Policy reviews, access reviews, evidence that expires, the renewal date, the reporting cycle — laid out for the year so they arrive as scheduled work rather than as a scramble.

How an engagement starts

Scope, baseline, roadmap, cadence.

We write down what is in the engagement and what is not — entities, frameworks, cadence, hours. Your advisor works through what exists and gives you a written position, including the parts that are worse than you expected. The roadmap is sequenced by what is actually due — the renewal, the customer review, the framework a contract named — with an owner and a quarter on each item. Then the sessions start, each one ending with recorded decisions and assigned actions, so the next one opens by checking what moved.

Including the bad week

This is not the incident retainer.

Between sessions the work sits with your control owners, and what your advisor does in between is what the statement of work says it is. If something goes wrong, your incident response provider and your counsel lead it; your advisor helps afterwards, folding what happened into the risk register, the controls and the roadmap. An advisory cadence that has never said what it does in an incident is a service you are buying on trust.

Platform and advisor together

Advice becomes a record, not a recommendation.

An advisor with their own spreadsheet leaves you with two versions of the truth and a handover problem. Yours works in the register your own people maintain, so a decision from a session lands as a row somebody owns. In the example workspace that is 7 open risks with 1 critical, 2 actions critical now, and a cyber-insurance renewal 96 days out — the standing agenda for the next session, drawn from the register rather than from memory.

See executive reporting

Screens captured from a Sentinel workspace on 10 September 2026. Northstar Manufacturing Ltd. is a fictional example — a 180-person manufacturer in Ontario, Canada — not a customer, and its scores are computed by the product from its records rather than typed in for the picture.

Straight answers

What Managed vCISO is not.

This belongs on the page rather than in a contract you read after signing.

  • A security operations centre. Nobody is watching a screen on your behalf overnight.
  • Monitoring, alerting, threat detection, or managed detection and response.
  • Emergency incident response. Your incident response provider and your counsel lead that.
  • Penetration testing, forensics or dark-web monitoring.
  • Legal advice, insurance brokerage, or an audit opinion. Those stay with your counsel, your broker and an independent auditor.
  • A transfer of accountability. Your management decides; your advisor makes the position clear and records what was decided.

Scope questions before a conversation: support@cyberwave.ca

Questions

What people ask before scoping an engagement.

Answered here so the conversation can start somewhere more useful than the price list.

What is the difference between Managed vCISO Lite and Managed vCISO?
Managed vCISO Lite is a published subscription at $999/month: everything in Full Platform, a named advisor, and a scheduled cadence with risk and roadmap review and reporting support. It is deliberately a fixed shape, which is why it can carry a published price. Managed vCISO starts from $2,499/month and is scoped in a statement of work, because advisory hours and board engagement vary most between organisations.
Does the advisor use one of our user seats?
Not on Managed vCISO Lite: the advisor works in your workspace without consuming one of your 5 included users. On Managed vCISO, users are agreed in the statement of work.
Is there a free trial on the advisory tiers?
No. The 14-day trial covers Essentials or Full Platform, because software can be sampled. A named advisor and a cadence cannot be sampled in a fortnight, so an engagement starts with a scoping conversation. Most people put the platform in first and add the advisor when the volume of decisions outgrows the people they have.
Who is accountable for security decisions during the engagement?

Your management. That is how the service is built, not a disclaimer at the end. Your advisor sets out the position, the options and the consequences, and records what was decided. Accepting a risk, funding remediation, signing a policy and representing your posture to an insurer or a customer stay with you.

Professional services terms

What happens if we hire a security leader of our own?
That is a good outcome, and the engagement is designed to survive it. Everything your advisor produced is already in your workspace under your ownership, so a new leader inherits a programme with dates on it rather than interviewing people about what was agreed last spring. Engagements are commonly reduced or wound down at that point, on the notice in the statement of work.

Start with the decisions that are already overdue.

The risk nobody has accepted or funded, the policy nobody has approved, the renewal with no owner. In the example workspace the list starts: “Critical risk — ransomware via phishing on plant-floor workstations: approve the treatment or formally accept it with conditions.” Put a list like that in front of a named advisor on a fixed cadence, and the backlog stops being a personality trait of your company.

Talk to us

A conversation first — the advisory plans have no self-service trial.

  • Published pricing on every standard plan
  • Tenant-isolated architecture, data stored in Canada
  • Clear data-processing terms
  • No compliance guarantee — human judgement still required