For many mid-to-late-stage growth companies, the first signs that “it’s time to get serious about security” feel urgent.

Your sales team just pushed a six-figure deal to next quarter because of inadequate responses to the prospect’s security questionnaire. Maybe your largest

 An enterprise customer is asking for a SOC 2. Or your board has started pressing for clearer answers on cyber risk.

In moments like these, hiring a full-time CISO feels like the obvious next step. You need security leadership. You need someone who can answer questions, lead strategy, and build confidence with customers and investors.

But here’s the catch: you may be ready for CISO-level expertise, but not for a full-time CISO. Jumping too quickly into a six-figure hire can drain budget and stall progress, especially if you haven’t set aside budget and allocated resources to build and operate a more sustainable security program.

Instead of rushing into a hire, it’s worth asking: what happens when you bring in a CISO before you’re ready?

The Problem with Hiring Too Soon

A strong CISO can build a robust security program, but their chances of success drop significantly if the company isn’t prepared for them. Without that foundation, even the best CISO spends their time firefighting. Juggling incidents, customer questionnaires, and compliance requests, rather than executing a strategy.

• The company posts a vague job description and hires the wrong profile (a compliance strategist when they need a more technical security leader, or vice versa).
• They bring them in without budget alignment or internal support, and progress stalls.
• The investment in a six-figure leader ends up funding personnel churn, not change.

The result? Leadership gets frustrated, security feels like a money pit, and the real work, building the foundation, still hasn’t happened.

Queue Fractional Leadership

Instead of hiring a full-time CISO before you’re ready, fractional leadership gives you what you need: the expertise and leadership of a CISO-level executive, scaled to your stage. Meaning the budget you save on a full-time salary can be redirected to:

• Hiring your first full-time security engineer to fix issues without derailing business objectives
• Funding new security functions, controls, and technologies that relieve some of the security pressure
• Training and maturing processes across IT, engineering, and operations

This approach allows you to reduce risk faster and build a program that scales, all without the overhead of a full-time executive you can’t fully utilize yet.

What Fractional Engagement Looks Like

At Iomergent, we help growth-stage companies establish the foundation their future CISO will need to succeed.

Our Phase 1 approach includes:

• A security assessment: Understanding your current risk profile, customer demands, and technical gaps.
• A tailored roadmap: Aligning security priorities with business strategy, budget, and compliance needs.
• Fractional leadership: Providing CISO-level expertise to drive momentum, executive alignment, and early wins without over-hiring.

The approach allows clients to build the program they need, then “graduate” from fractional support into hiring full-time CISOs who step into well-functioning programs, allowing the new CISO to rapidly scale and support the business’s expanded strategy and objectives.

And we love it! Because when our clients hire their first full-time CISO or elevate an internal leader to run security, we know we did our job. The company is scaling and understands the budget and the need for dedicated security leadership. The executive team and board see security as strategic and enabling, not reactive. Most importantly, the program is working –with enough structure, leadership, and cross-functional support to benefit from full-time ownership.