This Article at a Glance

• A top-tier CISO costs $350K–$600K/year before benefits, recruiting fees, or the months it takes to fill the role.
• The average CISO salary is $234K. PSS CaaS averages ~$108K/year and includes pen testing, GRC, dark web monitoring, and more.
• A full-time CISO has real advantages for the right organizations. This article covers both sides honestly.
• Most mid-market companies don’t have a half-staffed security program. They have an IT director wearing 12 hats.
• The cost comparison is not even close. But cost isn’t the only question to consider.

Your IT director is good at their job. They keep the lights on, manage the help desk, handle the hardware refresh cycle, and somewhere in there they’re also supposed to own cybersecurity. It’s likely the third or even fourth thing on their list every day. Then a vendor questionnaire shows up. An enterprise prospect wants to see your security posture before they’ll sign. And suddenly someone in the room is asking: do we need a real CISO? This article is for that conversation.

The Numbers, Plainly

A top-tier CISO will cost you between $350K and $600K a year in salary. Before benefits, before equity, before the recruiting firm you’ll pay 15–20% of first-year comp to find one. And before the 3–6 months your environment sits underprotected while you search.

The average CISO salary across the market sits at $234K. That’s a more realistic anchor for what mid-market companies are actually competing for when they post the job.

PSS CaaS runs at roughly $108K/year across our three tiers. You get vCISO leadership, pen testing, GRC assessments, dark web monitoring, security awareness training, policy work, and tool evaluation. This is not mere advisory; it’s execution.

The math is not even close.

But the math isn’t the whole story, and if you want to make a good decision here, you need the rest of it too.

“A top-tier CISO is going to cost you between 350 and 600K a year. And a lot of organizations in the SMB, the low mid-market space, just don’t have the type of money to afford that type of CISO. Yet they’re held to the same security challenges and regulatory challenges as large organizations. So that’s where we come in.”
— Chris Brown, VP Commercial Services, Point Solutions Security

What a Full-Time CISO Actually Gets You

Before we make the case for CaaS, here’s what a full-time CISO can do that a fractional arrangement typically cannot.

A full-time CISO is embedded. They’re in every executive meeting, absorbed in your culture, and present when something breaks at 11pm. They build institutional knowledge over the years. Their accountability is singular and total, and the board knows exactly who owns security.

For certain organizations, that’s worth the price. Organizations such as public companies, defense contractors handling classified work, and healthcare systems with direct HIPAA liability at the executive level. Organizations in a post-breach environment rebuilding trust from the ground up. If that’s you, a full-time CISO may genuinely be the right call.

If you want to go deeper on how vCISO and full-time CISO compare on capability and effectiveness, see our companion article on how a vCISO compares on effectiveness.

What we’re covering here is the cost side. And that’s where most companies are making decisions without the full picture.

The Real Cost You’re Not Calculating

Most organizations anchor the comparison on salary alone. That’s the wrong starting point.

Here’s what hiring a full-time CISO actually costs when you add it up: salary ($234K average, $350K–$600K for experienced enterprise talent), employer benefits and payroll taxes (add 20–30%), performance bonuses or equity for a senior security executive, recruiting fees (15–25% of first-year compensation, 3 to 6 months of search time while your program is patched together by whoever will still take the calls), and the ongoing management overhead of a full-time executive headcount.

That’s before you ask whether a CISO alone runs your pen tests, does your GRC work, monitors the dark web, and handles security awareness training. They don’t. They hire people for that. Which means you’re not comparing a CISO salary to a CaaS retainer. You’re comparing an entire security function versus a managed program.

And that doesn’t account for what’s happening in the meantime.

“I think a lot of our clients have a sysadmin or head of IT, director of IT, whatever you have, maybe a CIO — but the security slash IT component of the organization is really wearing a lot of hats. And so, if you’re half-assing two things, you don’t have time to whole-ass anything. So that’s where folks kind of end up continuously falling behind the ball, and then that’s sort of an exponential decay curve — put a fire out while three fires go, put another fire out, now there’s five fires going.”
— Chris Brown, VP Commercial Services, Point Solutions Security

That exponential decay is the cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet. You’re paying full-time wages for a part-time security program. An IT director is good at their job, but they’re being asked to do two jobs, and one of them is going to suffer.

What PSS CaaS Actually Includes (vs. a Standalone vCISO)

This distinction matters, and most buyers don’t know it exists.

A standalone vCISO is typically advisory. Strategy, roadmaps, compliance guidance, board reporting. Somebody to tell you who to hire and what has value, but that’s it.

“A lot of vCISO work is really just focused on that vCISO piece — just the, hey, I’m here to be a soundboard, hey, I’m here to talk about roadmaps. Where the Cybersecurity as a Service is so much deeper. We do pen tests that are included. We do GRC assessments. We do audit readiness. We go above and beyond with dark web scans. It’s a much deeper and focused effort towards an organization’s overall security posture and compliance posture than just a strategic vCISO.”
— Chris Brown, VP Commercial Services, Point Solutions Security

Here’s what’s included in PSS CaaS, depending on the tier: vCISO leadership with executive reporting, penetration testing (internal, external, web app), social engineering and phishing simulations, monthly vulnerability scanning, GRC assessments and audit readiness support across ISO 27001, SOC 2, CMMC, HIPAA, NIST CSF, PCI-DSS, dark web monitoring via Dark Wing Duck (PSS’s proprietary monitoring platform, exclusive to CaaS clients), security awareness training, third-party risk reviews, and security policy development.

That’s not merely a soundboard. It’s an operational security program.

The team behind it are specialists. People who have been doing pen testing, GRC, and security architecture for decades. Not generalists picking up security as a second hat.

PSS CaaS Tiers

Three tiers, priced simply:

• Give a Sh*t — $5,000/mo. vCISO/fractional CISO leadership, annual security maturity review, security awareness training, executive reporting.
• Get Sh*t Done — $5,850/mo. Everything in Give a Sh*t plus internal/external pen testing, web app pen testing, social engineering simulations, monthly vulnerability scanning, and PCI DSS scanning.
• Do Epic Sh*t — $6,500/mo. Everything above plus GRC assessments and audit support, third-party risk review, and dark web monitoring via Dark Wing Duck.

At the top tier, that’s $78K/year. At the average across tiers, it’s roughly $108K. Compare this to a $234K average CISO salary, before everything else on top of it.

The Real Question: What Meets Your Security Needs?

This isn’t a virtual versus full-time argument. It’s a question of what your organization actually needs to be secure and to grow.

If you need a fully embedded executive with direct board-level authority, a full-time CISO might be worth the investment. There are organizations for whom that’s the right answer.

If you need a mature, operational security program — with pen testing, GRC, dark web monitoring, compliance readiness, and expert leadership — at a cost that doesn’t require building an entire security department from scratch, that’s a different conversation.

“If you want 500 grand, spend 100 grand in security first.”
— Chris Brown, VP Commercial Services, Point Solutions Security

Frequently Asked Questions

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