The security program that proves you can be trusted with your brand clients' customer data.
For mid-size agencies with Fortune 500 accounts on the roster — banks, retailers, pharma. Enterprise-brand security posture, without the boutique-CISO retainer or the full-time hire.
Responding to a brand vendor assessment right now? See the workflow →
Why now
You are the soft target.
The domain to shore up isn’t compliance. It isn’t vendor forms. It’s data protection— how brand customer PII flows through your ops, and who along the way has to be trusted with it. Everything on this page is downstream of that.
- 2017WPP NotPetya — Ogilvy, JWT, Y&R, MediaCom, Maxus, GroupM offline simultaneously
- 2022WPP’s Choreograph / KBM Group — $42M DOJ settlement for a data unit that sold PII to fraudsters
- 2024Ad-account-takeover clusters industrialize: freelance ad-buyers with laptop access to Meta Business Manager and Google MCC targeted at scale
- 2025Dentsu · Merkle UK breach — employee payroll, bank details, and client + supplier data exfiltrated; UK ICO + NCSC notified
- Now30% of breaches involve a third party, doubled YoY (Verizon 2025 DBIR). If you’re the third party, you are the story.
- 01
The brand did the work. You didn’t.
Your brand spent five years and eight-figure budgets building a security program — SOC, hunt team, red team, third-party risk. You’re running Google Drive, Slack, a freelancer’s personal Dropbox, and an ad-account credential in 1Password. An attacker who spent a week trying to get into the brand’s security team will spend an afternoon on your account team and get further. That’s the math, and the brand’s CISO does it too.
- 02
You handle the data anyway. That is the problem.
GDPR Article 28 says you are the data processor whether you feel like one or not. Their customer PII is on your talent-agency partner’s shared drive. Their raw campaign footage is on a freelance editor’s laptop. Their consumer segmentation is in your CDP. Their ad-account credentials are one phishing email away. The domain to shore up isn’t “compliance.” It’s data protection — how customer data flows through your ops, and who has to be trusted with it along the way.
- 03
When it happens to you, they name you.
WPP. Merkle. Choreograph. The last decade of agency-side incidents has a pattern: the brand doesn’t move quietly. They notify, they name, and the trade press writes the headline with the agency in the subject line. Adweek called WPP’s NotPetya event “the wake-up call to agencies and CMOs.” That is why brand procurement is on the pitch — not because they trust the process, because they trust it less than they used to.
The three moments
Brand asks at the pitch. Brand asks at the sign. Brand asks every quarter after.
Given all of the above, the brand relationship isn’t a one-time procurement approval. It’s a lifecycle of data-protection questions, asked in three moments, and the security program that carries a brand across those moments is what keeps the retainer alive.
The brand's procurement questionnaire at the pitch.
Financial-services brand pulls from TruSight (the consortium standard the largest US banks pool). Pharma brand pulls HIPAA-adjacent BAA language. Retailer pulls PCI-adjacent. Tech brand pulls SOC 2. Losing the pitch to the agency that already had answers has happened.
The DPA + subprocessor list at the DPA sign.
You're the brand's data processor under Article 28. Their DPO wants every talent agency, UGC platform, media buyer, and freelance editor named, with lawful basis and cross-border transfer mechanism (SCC / DPF). Their legal team wants an MSA cyber addendum. Get this wrong and the retainer stalls in redline for a month.
The brand's security team every quarter after.
TPRM industry standard for critical vendors is quarterly review plus continuous monitoring — not annual reassessment. 28% of GDPR enforcement actions involve third-party data processing (Kiteworks 2026). The brand's security team isn't going away after the pitch; they're on a rolling clock for the life of the retainer.
The solution
Enterprise-brand data protection on an agency budget.
Five capabilities of the same platform. Every one built to answer a question a real brand procurement team, DPO, or ongoing security reviewer asks.
SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR-processor readiness in one path
Data protection is the domain; frameworks are how you evidence it. Guided prep with layered controls that reuse evidence across SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Brand's procurement wants SOC 2? Ready. Their DPO wants Article 28? Same source of truth. Cross-mapped to 250+ frameworks via the SCF corpus.
Brand questionnaires drafted from your live evidence
Import SIG, CAIQ, HECVAT, VSAQ, the bank-consortium standard, or the brand's bespoke XLSX. AI drafts every answer grounded in policies, framework controls, evidence, scanner findings, and the knowledge base that grows with every approved answer. Second-pass Evaluator flags what needs human review before send.
The subprocessor list your brand's DPO asks for
Every talent agency, UGC platform, programmatic buyer, freelance editor, cloud provider, IdP, and EDR is a governed row in the vendor register: lawful basis, cross-border transfer mechanism (SCC / DPF / N/A), breach-notification window, and a WATCH badge if the DPA is drafted but not yet countersigned. Passwordless magic-link portal for external subs to fill their own side.
Automated evidence from the agency stack you actually run
Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Teams, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Trello, Notion, Confluence, Airtable, Dropbox, Box, HubSpot, Salesforce, Okta / Entra ID / OneLogin / Ping, 1Password, CrowdStrike, BambooHR, Workday. Evidence collects continuously; auditors and brand-DPOs get the folder pre-populated.
Quarterly refresh + auditor client portal on the same clock
Brand's security team isn't going away after the pitch. The auditor client portal gives them a seven-tab shared workspace with an offline chain-integrity verifier; quarterly refresh pushes subprocessor changes into their DPO's queue automatically. Your principal isn't on daily Zooms.
The working state
Every place brand PII currently flows through your ops. On one screen.
Article 28 says the brand’s DPO can ask you for this list any Tuesday. Rows are your subprocessors. Columns are your brand accounts. Every colored cell is a live data flow. Green = DPA current, amber = pending, red = flowing without a DPA. Un-runnable from a Slack thread. Tractable here.
How the platform actually works
Connect the stack once. Frameworks cross-map. Every answer drafts from live evidence.
- 01 · connect
Your stack becomes your evidence stream.
25+ shipped integrations pull continuously from the tools you already run — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Okta / Entra ID / OneLogin / Ping, 1Password, CrowdStrike, HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Confluence, Dropbox, Box, BambooHR, Workday. Access logs, org roster, endpoint posture, MFA state, share settings. The subprocessor register self-populates from what the integrations see.
- 02 · cross-map
One control satisfies twelve frameworks.
The SCF corpus (Secure Controls Framework, 1,300+ controls, 250+ frameworks) is the translation layer. Evidence collected once against a control counts toward SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and every other framework the SCF maps to. When the brand’s pharma DPO asks about HIPAA and the retailer’s procurement asks about SOC 2, they’re asking about the same evidence, in different vocabulary.
- 03 · draft
When a brand asks anything, the answer drafts from your live state.
Import the brand’s SIG / CAIQ / HECVAT / VSAQ / bespoke XLSX. AI drafts every answer grounded in your policies, framework controls, control evidence, and scanner findings — not hallucinated, not generic. A second-pass Evaluator scores each draft; anything under confidence flags for human review, anything under floor blocks the send. Approved answers write back to the knowledge base so the next questionnaire drafts even faster.
Is this you?
You’re the right fit for vCISO Lite if any two of these are true.
Mid-size agencies don’t three-way shop cyber consultants. Either you’re carrying enough enterprise-brand pressure that the compliance workload is bleeding into billable capacity, or you’re about to. Read the list.
Your ops director just spent 20+ hours hand-answering a brand's Excel questionnaire and is on hour 3 of the next one.
Your MSP said the SOC 2 / GDPR ask is out of scope, and quoted you 40+ hours prep to try anyway.
You lost, delayed, or walked away from a Fortune 500 pitch because your compliance documentation wasn't ready.
You looked at a Vanta or Drata quote, said no, and haven't found a mid-size-agency-priced alternative.
A brand's DPO is asking for your subprocessor list and you're pulling it together from a Slack thread.
You just onboarded a pharma or fintech brand and realized the BAA / SCC language you had is not what they'll sign.
If you’re running a boutique brand shop with no enterprise accounts, you probably don’t need us yet. When your first Fortune 500 pitch lands, this is the number to save.
What lands in your hands
Six to eight weeks in: eleven deliverables, in the order you’ll use them.
Each deliverable maps to a moment in the brand-client lifecycle. Each is exportable in the brand’s expected format. Each is linked back to the feature that keeps it current after it ships.
Advisory hours · higher tiers
Some things a platform can’t do alone.
Brand-crisis phone call at 11pm on a Sunday. Meta Business Manager compromised. Unreleased-creative leak from a freelancer’s personal Dropbox. Enterprise-brand MSA cyber-addendum negotiation. Holding-company annual review. Incident-response coordination with a brand’s DPO under the 72-hour clock. vCISO Lite pairs with the Other20 advisory team — fifteen years of agency and Fortune 500 security leadership, priced by engagement, no full-time hire.
Common questions
What agency ops directors ask us
Do we really need SOC 2 if our brand clients keep asking for GDPR-processor language?
Different questions, related answers. SOC 2 is the American brand's default proof of security controls; the Fortune-500 CPG or tech client will ask for it by name. GDPR Article 28 is the EU brand's DPO asking whether you can be their processor at all. vCISO Lite cross-maps SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA and 246 more via the SCF corpus, so evidence collected for one counts toward the others. Most agencies end up carrying SOC 2 + GDPR-processor language as the default set.
Our subprocessor list includes talent agencies and freelancers. How granular does the brand's DPO actually want it?
Granular. Article 28(2) of the GDPR requires the processor (you) to disclose every sub-processor engaged for the controller's (brand's) data, including talent-agency partners who touch consumer PII, UGC platforms that store creator content with brand references, and freelance editors with raw campaign footage. vCISO Lite treats each as a governed vendor row: category, lawful basis, cross-border transfer mechanism (SCC / DPF), breach-notification window, and a WATCH badge if the sub isn't yet contractually pinned. The passwordless magic-link portal lets external subs fill their own side.
One of our clients is pharma. Do we need to be HIPAA-compliant?
You need to know whether you're a Business Associate. If you receive, create, maintain, or transmit Protected Health Information for the pharma client, yes, a BAA is required and you inherit HIPAA Security Rule obligations for that engagement. If your work is brand marketing that never touches PHI, no. vCISO Lite ships HIPAA in the framework registry alongside SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR, and the policy engine can generate the BAA-aligned language when the engagement requires it.
What actually happens when our Meta Business Manager or Google Ads MCC gets compromised?
Ad-account takeover specifically targets freelance and contract ad-buyers with laptop access to MCC / Business Manager — 83% of digital businesses hit at least once (Sift, 2025). What the platform does own: the incident-response runbook, the pre-drafted notification cascade (brand, brand's DPO, cyber insurer, affected consumers), the post-incident evidence pack, and the vendor-incident register entry with the timeline. The Other20 advisory team can walk you through readiness and IR-runbook design ahead of time; the live phone call is a dedicated incident-response firm, and we'll help you keep one on retainer before you need them.
We already use Google Workspace and Slack. Why not just do this ourselves?
You can. You're here because that's obviously not working. The shipped integrations pull the evidence either way; what the platform gives you on top is the AI questionnaire-response engine (SIG / CAIQ / bespoke Excel drafted in hours), the ~90 policy types generated from your actual stack, the SCF framework cross-mapping (evidence once, answers many), the vendor + subprocessor register with a magic-link external portal, and the FAIR-quantified renewal packet for your cyber insurer. That's the difference between having the evidence and having the answers ready when the brand's DPO asks on Wednesday.
Ready for the brand-client relationship to stop stalling on security?
Answer their questionnaire in hours. Hand their DPO the register before they ask twice. Show up quarterly with the refresh already sent.