A fixed-price gap analysis, remediation through to your audit, and upkeep after it. All in a workspace you keep.
All compliance →Led by a published security researcher with five CVEs. One standard report, letters for your buyers, and retests of your fixes.
All security →To the people you sell to, raise from or answer to.
All industries →Original research, free tools, and plain-language guides on security and compliance, from a published security researcher.
Read the blog →A full-time CISO is the right answer at a certain scale. Below that scale, you are paying a base salary that typically starts around $300K plus equity and benefits for a role that may only need a fraction of a week. A fractional CISO gives you the leadership without the full-time burn. Here is the honest comparison.
We would rather tell you the truth than win a bad-fit client. Here is when the alternative is genuinely the better choice.
If that is you, hire full-time, and a fractional CISO can even help you scope the role and interview candidates. Most growing companies are not there yet.
| traztech | Full-time CISO | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | From $2,500 per month | Base salary that typically starts around $300K, plus equity and benefits |
| Time to value | Starts once the scope is agreed, no hiring search | Three to six months to source, interview, and onboard a senior hire |
| Who does the work | A published security researcher acting as your CISO | One full-time executive you have to find, afford, and retain |
| Who answers the auditor | We own the program and sit in the audit | Your CISO, once hired and ramped |
| Depth | Strategy plus hands-on execution and remediation | Depends entirely on the individual you hire |
| Scaling down | Scope adjusts as the work changes | A full-time salary is fixed cost whether the work fills the week or not |
Every number below comes from an engagement record and links to the full case study.
This is the whole question behind a fractional arrangement, and it has a direct answer. The Humera programme was built in-house from nothing by one operator, controls, change approval, asset inventory and policies included. It passed with zero exceptions.
Read how it was builtA full-time hire spends their first quarter learning your environment. An operator who has run the programme before arrives knowing what auditors accept, which is worth real money: on one engagement the audit quote came down purely from having the readiness position documented before the firm priced it.
See what readiness was worthA data centre operator ran SOC 2 and ISO 27001 in parallel across three physical sites. Sequencing those hires would have taken longer than running both programmes did.
Read the parallel engagementMore at all case studies.
You get a security leader who owns the strategy, the roadmap, and the audit relationship, from $2,500 per month instead of a $300K plus base.
Hiring a senior CISO takes months and a strong candidate may not exist in your market. We start with an onboarding month: your environment, registers and open risks reviewed, and a plan agreed.
A fractional CISO from traztech does not just advise. We build the policies, run the SOC 2, handle the questionnaires, and remediate findings ourselves.
Five published CVEs including the CVSS 9.1 kill-switch for the Mirai botnet covered by CyberInsider. Your customers and auditors get a name with provable depth behind it.
The same job as a full-time CISO, scaled to your stage: owns the security strategy and roadmap, runs SOC 2 and other compliance, answers security questionnaires, manages vendor and customer security reviews, leads incident response, and sits in the audit. The difference is you pay for the fraction you need.
Base salaries for an experienced CISO typically start around $300K and climb well past that in major markets, before equity, benefits, and recruiting fees. The total loaded cost is often far more than the base alone. A fractional engagement is a fraction of that.
Yes. What auditors and enterprise customers want is a named, accountable security owner who can answer for the program. A fractional CISO is exactly that. Our principal being a published security researcher with a SOC 2 Type II background tends to carry more weight than a title alone.
When the workload genuinely fills a full week, you have an internal team that needs daily management, or a board or regulator expects a full-time executive. We will tell you when you are approaching that line, and we will help you hire and transition.
Yes. A fractional CISO can set direction, run the program, and lead an existing internal team part-time. If the team is large enough to need daily, full-time management, that is the signal to hire full-time.
Incident response is part of the engagement. We lead the response, coordinate the team, and handle customer and regulatory communication. Many clients pair the fractional CISO with an incident response retainer for agreed response times.
traztech Workspace covers the same self-assessment ground for nothing: every control in plain English, an evidence register, policy templates, a risk register, and vendor questionnaires. It does not do continuous monitoring or auto-collection, and we say so plainly. If all you need right now is to understand the scope, you do not need a subscription for that.
No credit card, no trial clock, no locked features. We make money when someone wants help closing the gaps, not from the Workspace.
| traztech Workspace | Other GRC platforms | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | $0. Free forever, no card, no paid tier | $7,500 to $50,000 a year, on an annual contract |
| Control library, evidence register, policy templates, risk register, vendor questionnaires, readiness scoring | Included | Included |
| What it costs inside an engagement with us | $0. You need a workspace either way | Unchanged. The subscription sits on top of the fee |
| What it does to your audit quote | A documented readiness position the audit firm can scope and price against | Nothing. The audit firm prices your readiness, not your tooling |
Platform pricing is a publicly reported range, since none of them publish a number. The fuller comparison, including when a paid platform is the better buy, is on the Workspace page.
Get a fractional CISO who owns the strategy and does the work, without a months-long hiring search.
Ready to move? Start with SOC 2 readiness or see our pricing.
Book a strategy callFree PDFs, no card
The IR plan template and the vendor security questionnaire as PDFs, plus the readiness checklists. Free, no card.
From Jacob Masse, principal of traztech: the files by email, then a few short notes over the next month. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Track record
We would rather show you the work than a wall of logos. Here is what is behind the advice.
Five published CVEs. CVE-2024-45163 (CVSS 9.1) is a flaw in the Mirai botnet itself, which gave defenders a way to shut down attacker infrastructure. CVE-2026-42626 takes HP ENVY 5000 printers offline from any unauthenticated device on the same network.
The printer is the one that matters on a compliance page: an asset nobody counts as a computer, on a flat network, downed by a device that never had to log in. Auditors ask how controls fail. We have found out first-hand.
At Humera, a venture-backed US security company, Jacob built the compliance programme in-house from nothing: no report, no policies, no documented controls. It ended in a Type II attestation with zero exceptions.
The platform stayed in production throughout, which is the part most readiness projects get wrong: controls are easy to design and hard to retrofit onto a system people already depend on.
For a Waterloo data centre operator we ran SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022 together rather than one after the other, across a production campus, an AI compute platform and a self-hosted collaboration stack. Scoped so further Ontario and Quebec sites enter as they reach production. Findings delivered and remediated.
For an Ontario medtech company putting an AI clinical assistant in front of practitioners, we ran the gap analysis and built the evidence programme behind their SOC 2.