Virtual CISO & Managed Cybersecurity in Nigeria
A named, accountable security leader on retainer — owning your security strategy, your ISO 27001 and NDPA governance, your monitoring and your incident response, for a fraction of what a full-time CISO costs.
250+
Projects Delivered Since 2020
Named CISO
Not A Ticket Queue
ISO 27001 & NDPA
Governance Included
₦850k+
Per Month, 12-Month Term
We reply on WhatsApp within minutes.
The Gap This Fills
A Nigerian fintech with forty staff cannot justify a full-time Chief Information Security Officer. A hospital group cannot recruit one at the salary it can pay. An MDA cannot get the headcount approved. So the responsibility lands on the head of IT, who is already running infrastructure and support, and security becomes whatever is left over after the servers stay up.
Then something forces the issue. A partner bank sends a security questionnaire before signing. An investor's due diligence asks who owns security and wants to see the policy set. The NDPC's compliance audit cycle arrives. A customer demands ISO 27001. Or there is an incident, and the first question from the board is one nobody can answer: who was supposed to be watching this?
A virtual CISO is the answer to that question. You get a named individual with the authority and the mandate to own security across your organisation, working a defined number of days a month on retainer, reporting to your executive and accountable for outcomes — rather than a consultancy that sends a report and leaves.
What this is not. It is not a helpdesk, an antivirus subscription, or a one-off audit with a PDF at the end. It is not a junior analyst with a senior title. And it is not a substitute for your IT team — the vCISO sets direction and holds the risk register; your team, or ours, does the hands-on work.
What the Retainer Covers
Strategy and the risk register
A security assessment in month one, a prioritised roadmap costed against your actual budget, and a living risk register with named owners and review dates. Quarterly reassessment. The register is the artefact your board, your auditor and your enterprise customers will all ask to see, and almost no Nigerian SME has one worth showing.
Policy, standards and evidence
The full policy set written for how your business actually operates, not a downloaded template with your logo on it: access control, acceptable use, change management, backup and recovery, vendor management, incident response, business continuity. Then the evidence discipline that makes them real at audit time.
ISO 27001 and NDPA governance
Gap analysis, Statement of Applicability, control implementation, internal audit and management review — run as a programme rather than a scramble before the certification body arrives. NDPA obligations are handled in the same cycle because the controls overlap heavily and doing them separately costs twice.
Monitoring and detection
Log aggregation from your servers, applications, cloud accounts and endpoints, alerting on the patterns that matter, vulnerability scanning on a schedule with remediation tracked to closure, and monthly reporting on what was found and what was fixed. We work with your existing tooling where it is adequate and tell you plainly where it is not.
Incident response
A written plan, defined roles and a tested escalation path before anything happens, then a rehearsed tabletop exercise so the plan has been used once in calm conditions. When a real incident comes, you get triage, containment guidance, forensics coordination and the regulatory notification clock managed — the NDPA's 72-hour breach notification window is short and it starts before you have finished panicking.
Third parties and people
Vendor risk assessment and a register of who has access to what, security review of new integrations before they go live, staff awareness training with phishing simulations, and the security questionnaires your enterprise and bank customers send — answered properly and consistently instead of improvised by whoever opens the email.
Retainer Tiers and Pricing
Global vCISO retainers are commonly quoted between $3,000 and $15,000 a month. We price in naira against Nigerian delivery costs, which is why the same function costs meaningfully less here without the engagement being thinner.
Essential
₦850,000 / month
Two days a month. Risk register and roadmap, policy set maintained, quarterly reassessment, vendor reviews, customer security questionnaires answered, monthly report and a quarterly session with your executive. Suits a 20–80 person business with a competent IT lead already in place.
Managed
₦1,800,000 / month
Four days a month plus monitoring. Everything in Essential, plus log aggregation and alerting, scheduled vulnerability scanning with remediation tracked to closure, staff awareness and phishing simulation, one tabletop exercise a year and incident response on call. The tier most regulated Nigerian businesses land on.
Certification
₦3,200,000 / month
Eight days a month for organisations driving to ISO 27001 certification or through an NDPA audit cycle on a deadline. Everything in Managed, plus the full certification programme, internal audit, management review, and direct engagement with your certification body and your licensed DPCO. Typically a 9–12 month push, then step down to Managed.
Twelve-month terms. Penetration testing is quoted separately per engagement because scope varies enormously — see penetration testing in Nigeria — and retainer clients get it at a standing discount with findings fed straight into the risk register rather than arriving as an unconnected report.
Who This Is Actually For
Fintechs and lenders
You hold BVNs, bank details and transaction histories. Partner banks and payment providers send security questionnaires before they will integrate, the CBN's expectations on operational resilience keep rising, and an incident is existential rather than inconvenient. Most Nigerian fintechs reach forty staff with no one accountable for security. That is the gap.
Hospitals, HMOs and labs
Health data is the most sensitive category there is, and clinical systems are notoriously hard to patch without disrupting care. You need someone who can hold both realities at once and sequence the work so patient safety is not traded for a compliance box.
Government MDAs
Citizen data at scale, public-facing systems, and an accountability exposure that is political as well as legal. A vCISO gives an agency security leadership without a permanent establishment line, and produces the documentation an oversight body will eventually ask for.
Businesses selling into enterprises
If you are a SaaS company or an outsourcer trying to close banks, telcos, oil and gas or multinationals, security review is now the gate you fail at. ISO 27001 plus a credible security story frequently converts a stalled deal. This is the tier where the retainer pays for itself in one contract.
How We Start, and Why Us
Week 1–2 — Assessment
Interviews, architecture review, cloud and infrastructure configuration review, access audit, vendor inventory and a technical baseline scan. We look at what exists rather than what the documentation claims exists.
Week 3 — Findings and roadmap
A written report your board can read, findings ranked by real risk rather than scanner severity, and a costed twelve-month roadmap. Anything genuinely urgent gets fixed in that same week.
Month 2 onward — The operating rhythm
Monthly report and working session, quarterly executive briefing, continuous register upkeep, and the on-call line for when something happens at two in the morning.
The reason to take this from us rather than from a pure security consultancy is that we build software for a living. Musskart Technology Limited is a registered Nigerian software company in Asaba with an Abuja office and 250+ projects delivered since 2020 — fintech platforms, hospital systems, loan apps, government revenue systems. When our vCISO says an authorisation check is missing on an endpoint, they can point at the endpoint. When the remediation requires a schema change and a migration, we have engineers who do that work rather than a recommendation that sits in a folder for a year.
The common alternative is a foreign vCISO firm. They are often excellent and they are also expensive in dollars, unfamiliar with the NDPA, the NDPC and the CBN's expectations, and asleep when your incident starts. That is not a knock on their competence; it is a statement about fit.
Related Musskart Pages
Need testing rather than leadership?
If what you actually need right now is a technical assessment — a penetration test, a code review or a cloud configuration audit — rather than ongoing leadership, start at cybersecurity and penetration testing in Nigeria. Many clients test first and take the retainer once they see the findings.
- ISO 27001, CMMI & HIPAA Readiness — the certification programme in detail
- NDPA Compliance Audit & CAR Filing — data-protection obligations and DPO-as-a-Service
- Cybersecurity & Penetration Testing — technical testing engagements
- Fintech App Development in Nigeria — where most of our security work originates
- Musskart Pricing — how we price work across all our services
- Contact Musskart — phone, email and office details
Frequently Asked Questions
Get Security Leadership Without the Headcount
Tell us your size, your sector and what triggered the search — an audit, a partner questionnaire, an investor, or an incident. We will propose a tier and start with a two-week assessment so you are buying against findings rather than a brochure.
