Managed security and compliance services in India
A retainer can hold part-time security leadership, risk and audit work, and incident escalation and response, all for an agreed term. You buy lower risk and an audit position you can defend.
What a retainer can hold
Three kinds of work. You choose the mix before the term starts, and each link explains one part.
A vCISO (virtual chief information security officer) is a part-time security lead who runs your security program, keeps the risk register current and prepares the decisions your executives take. The tier's committed hours set the size of the role.
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) work that carries on between audits: readiness for ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2, NIST CSF 2.0 or ISO/IEC 42001:2023, a risk register kept current, board packs with risk heat maps, supplier risk, policy-as-code blueprints (your rules written so systems can check them) and twice-yearly reviews of your cryptographic and secure development standards.
Executive tabletop exercises, an escalation plan with named people, and hands-on containment and investigation once an incident is declared. SOC readiness gets your own security operations center (SOC) team, or a chosen provider, ready to act on alerts.
Term, not hours
A block of hours answers the wrong question. It says how much attention is reserved, not whether your risk is going down. An outsourced compliance team sold by the hour can end up spent on whatever is loudest that week.
That is why our minimum term is 6 months and the default is 12: a shorter contract ends before the work shows in the risk register or the audit. The hours still matter: they set the size of the commitment.
Judge a managed GRC provider by what the register and the audit look like at the end of the term.
Choosing a retainer
Both tiers run on the same term. They differ in committed hours and in what each one includes by name.
| What the tier sets | Mid-market / growth tier | Enterprise tier |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum term | 6 months | 6 months |
| Default term | 12 months | 12 months |
| Committed hours | About 20 to 25 fractional executive hours a month | About 40 to 50 dedicated hours a month |
| Named in the tier | Continuous automated compliance monitoring | Direct board-level reporting, escalation coordination |
Not sure which tier fits? It mostly depends on who reads the reports. The vCISO page matches common requests to a tier.
Before you sign
Settle them in this order. Each answer shapes the next.
List the audits coming up and the questions your board keeps asking. Those two lists decide how much of the retainer goes to audit readiness and how much to risk reporting.
A board that wants a security lead points to vCISO services. Audit evidence points to compliance as a service, and a live risk register to risk management as a service. GRC as a service runs both as one program.
If nobody does today, decide which hours need cover and who acts on an alert, and write both down. If your own team already watches them, the retainer's monitoring can be compliance monitoring alone.
Write down who at your business leads, who SecWiz escalates to, and which regulators and other parties the plan names. Then escalation starts from names, not job titles.
Scope and limits
"Monitoring" can mean two different jobs, and incidents raise a third question. Here is what a retainer covers for each.
Checking that your controls keep working and keep producing evidence. That is the work of compliance as a service, and the growth tier lists it by name: continuous automated compliance monitoring.
Watching systems for signs of an attack. SecWiz does not operate a security operations center. Where a managed security retainer includes security monitoring, its coverage hours and escalation path are agreed in writing. If your team or a chosen provider will run it, our SOC readiness work helps set up the logging, detections, alert rules and runbooks they depend on.
Once an incident is declared, SecWiz runs the escalation plan with your leadership, regulators and other parties, and carries out containment and investigation hands-on. Plans, playbooks and rehearsals written before any incident are on the incident response page.
What a retainer does not include. SecWiz does not operate a security operations center. Preparation bought on its own, such as a response plan, is a separate service. Readiness is not a certification audit and produces no certificate: we keep your evidence ready for the auditor or certification body.
NIST's Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 has a Continuous Monitoring category (DE.CM). It covers monitoring assets to find anomalies, indicators of compromise and other potentially adverse events, which is the job of security monitoring, whoever runs it. The other sense, checking that controls keep working and producing evidence, is compliance work.
NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3 lists outsourcing a security operations center to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) as one way to staff incident handling, and notes that such a provider can take a primary role in detecting, responding to and recovering from incidents.
FAQ
Terms, tiers, monitoring and incidents. For anything else, ask us directly.
At SecWiz, a managed security and compliance retainer holds continuous compliance monitoring, incident escalation coordination and hands-on incident response. The governance side carries living risk registers, board-ready posture packs with risk heat maps, third-party risk management, policy-as-code blueprints, twice-yearly reviews of cryptographic and secure development standards, and executive tabletop exercises. Where a managed security retainer includes security monitoring, its coverage hours and escalation path are agreed in writing. SecWiz does not operate a security operations center.
No. SecWiz does not operate a security operations center. Where a managed security retainer includes security monitoring, its coverage hours and escalation path are agreed in writing. Security monitoring looks for adverse events on your systems; continuous compliance monitoring of control evidence shows whether controls still work. Retainer clients also get incident escalation coordination and hands-on containment and investigation, on a 6-month minimum term.
SecWiz's minimum term is 6 months, and the default is 12 months. Governance changes, the remediation of known risks and changes in how people handle security take time to show in a risk register or an audit. A shorter contract would end while that work was still under way, leaving the board nothing to measure.
The mid-market / growth tier commits about 20 to 25 fractional executive hours a month plus continuous automated compliance monitoring. The enterprise tier commits about 40 to 50 dedicated hours a month and includes direct board-level reporting and incident escalation coordination. Both tiers carry the same 6-month minimum and 12-month default term.
Yes, for retainer clients. Once an incident is declared, SecWiz works the escalation plan with the business's leadership, regulators and other parties, and carries out containment and investigation hands-on. Executive tabletop exercises on ransomware and data breach scenarios let leaders rehearse those decisions first. Preparation bought on its own, such as a response plan, is a separate service.
An MSSP, or managed security services provider, watches systems for attacks and handles incidents when they happen. A GRC (governance, risk and compliance) provider keeps the governance side current: the risk register, audit readiness, supplier risk and what the board sees. One answers what is happening on your systems, and the other whether controls and decisions will hold up in front of an auditor. A SecWiz retainer carries the risk and audit work, plus incident escalation coordination and hands-on response. SecWiz does not operate a security operations center; where a managed security retainer includes security monitoring, its coverage hours and escalation path are agreed in writing.
Let's talk
Tell us which audits are coming, what your board asks about, and whether anyone watches your systems today, and during which hours. We reply within one working day.