Most small and mid-sized businesses don't get breached because they bought the wrong tool. They get breached because no one owns the risk. I sit in that seat — setting the security direction, holding your vendors accountable, and making sure you're ready before the incident, not scrambling after it.
The average ransomware incident keeps a small business down for days and costs six figures once you add recovery, downtime, and lost trust. For a 5–75 person company, that's existential. Here's what owning the risk actually gets you.
Two-thirds of ransomware now hits companies under 500 people. You're not too small to target — you're the easy target. Three reasons it keeps working:
Your MSP patches and monitors, but they don't set strategy or carry the risk. Leadership assumes it's handled. It usually isn't — it's just unassigned.
MFA is "on," backups are "running," the firewall is "configured." Until someone tests them under attack conditions, those are assumptions, not defenses.
Most cyber policies require specific controls. If you attest you have them and you don't, the claim gets denied at the worst possible moment — after the breach.
This isn't theory I read in a vendor whitepaper. I've run security for a multi-site business through a live attack.
In 2020 a ransomware attack hit a business I ran IT for. Because the backups were air-gapped and the recovery plan was real, we were back in two hours — not the weeks most firms lose. That's the difference owning the risk makes.
I don't resell security products or take a cut from any vendor. I have no reason to sell you tools you don't need — my only job is to lower your risk and prove it to your board, your clients, and your insurer.
I sit above the day-to-day support layer and own the things that actually move your risk down.
A ranked, plain-English inventory of what could hurt the business and what to fix first — reviewed with leadership, not buried in a report.
A written, rehearsed plan for who does what in the first hour of an attack — including the backups, the calls, and the decisions you don't want to make under pressure.
I map your actual controls against your policy's requirements so your coverage holds up when you need to file — and so you're not over-paying for it either.
I hold your support providers to a real security standard and translate what they're doing — or not doing — into terms leadership can act on.
Let's find yours before someone else does. Executive security leadership for Oklahoma City businesses.
grey@okcvcio.com · (405) 209-6071 · okcvcio.com