vCISO Lite Launches — Policy Generation, Compliance Audit Support, and Vendor Risk Management for Growing Companies That Can't Afford a Full-Time CISO

ATLANTA — January 16, 2026 —vCISO Lite, a compliance and cyber risk platform built for growing companies that can’t afford a full-time CISO, launched today with a live MVP covering policy generation, compliance audit support, and vendor risk management. The company was founded on a single premise its founder, Yolonda Smith, tested repeatedly across 20 years of cybersecurity leadership: growing companies need roughly 80% of what a CISO delivers, at 5% of the cost— and nothing on the market was built to hand it to them.

The gap is well-documented. Enterprise procurement teams now send 200-question security assessments before signing any contract, treat SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications as operational-maturity signals, and expect documented policies and vendor risk assessments as baseline evidence. Roughly 70% of customers say they would stop doing business with a vendor after a security incident (Gemalto/Thales), Gartner projects that 60% of enterprises will make supplier security a primary buying criterion by 2025, and Gartner has separately found that startups with early compliance certifications post 20% higher fundraising success. For a company without a full-time CISO to answer any of it, the deal doesn’t vanish — it gets discounted.

“I spent fifteen years running security programs at companies that grew from startup to IPO, and I kept solving the same problem three or four times a year for other founders: a growing company losing enterprise deals to a security posture question they had no one on staff to answer,” said Yolonda Smith, founder of vCISO Lite. “A full-time CISO costs a quarter-million dollars before benefits. A consultant costs six figures a year and vanishes between engagements. vCISO Lite is the thing I wished I could hand those founders before it became my problem to clean up on the other side of a breach. Eighty percent of what a CISO delivers, at five percent of the cost, priced so the companies that need it can actually buy it.”

What’s in the release

The vCISO Lite MVP is live today at vcisolite.com with three capabilities designed to close the gap enterprise buyers actually probe:

• Policy generation— defensible security policies drafted against the frameworks enterprise procurement asks about (SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar), customized to the company’s stack and stage. What a consultant charges $20,000 to produce, generated in minutes rather than months.
• Compliance audit support— gap analysis against SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST frameworks, plus the working evidence customers need to answer the 200-question questionnaires that gate enterprise contracts. Continuous readiness instead of the annual scramble.
• Vendor risk management— the discipline enterprise buyers apply to their vendors, applied inside the customer’s own environment. Vendor inventory, risk assessment, and the documentation procurement expects to see.

The platform is priced at $299 per month, self-serve from signup, and requires no sales conversation to get started — an intentional design choice against a market in which the same operational security work is otherwise priced for companies with a full security budget. As the company’s founding pagelays out, the alternative price points are a full-time CISO at $250,000–$400,000 per year, a security consultant at $50,000–$150,000 per engagement, or an enterprise GRC platform at $30,000–$100,000 per year plus implementation.

Who built it

vCISO Lite was founded by Yolonda Smith, a career cybersecurity leader whose credential set is the same one enterprise buyers implicitly ask for when they send a security questionnaire:

• 20+ years in cybersecurity leadership, having built security programs from zero to IPO at multiple companies.
• CISSP, CISM, GCIH, GSEC— the certifications that appear on every senior security job description.
• U.S. Air Force veteran (8 years), with a background protecting classified systems before moving into commercial security leadership.
• MS Information Technology, BS Computer Science, and author of the Quantitative Cyber Diligence (QCD) methodology — a five-pillar framework for M&A cyber risk assessment that will be published in book form later this year.

The founder’s perspective is the point. vCISO Lite is not an outside-in read of the market; it’s the platform its founder wished she could have handed to the growing companies she watched lose deals, absorb devaluation, or get breached because the discipline she practiced at scale had never been priced for them.

Availability

vCISO Lite is generally available today at vcisolite.comat $299 per month, with self-serve signup and no sales conversation required. Company background, market context, and the founder’s story are published at vcisolite.com/about. Future work on the platform will extend the current MVP with quantitative cyber risk assessment, continuous risk monitoring, and M&A cyber diligence — each grounded in the same premise the company launched on: hand growing companies the discipline enterprise buyers expect, at a price the companies that need it can actually pay.

About vCISO Lite

vCISO Lite is a compliance and cyber risk platform for growing companies that don’t have a full-time CISO. The platform helps customers close compliance gaps (SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar frameworks), generate defensible security policies, complete enterprise security questionnaires, and manage vendor risk — the operational work a CISO would normally do, priced for companies that can’t hire one. Founded by Yolonda Smith, a career cybersecurity leader with 20+ years building security programs from zero to IPO. vCISO Lite is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Learn more at vcisolite.com or read the founding story.

Media Contact

Press & Analyst Inquiries
Yolonda Smith, Founder
press@vcisolite.com

###

Related reading

What is a vCISO? A Complete Guide — the discipline this launch is built around.

vCISO Pricing in 2026 — the pricing model the launch anchors on.