ABOUT
Built to stand behind people who are already trying.
CyberBackstop is a security consultancy with one unusual rule: your team stays the team. We add depth, judgement, and a second read — and we get smaller as your people get stronger.
WHY THIS EXISTS
Most security advice is written for companies that don’t exist.
The security industry mostly sells to two audiences. There are enterprises with a security department, and there are companies with nothing at all. Frameworks, tooling, and consulting are all built for one of those two shapes.
Almost nobody is either. The typical company has an IT director who took on security, or a devops lead who reads the CVE feed, or a CTO who owns risk on the org chart and handles it in the gaps between quarters. They have real controls, real judgement, and real gaps — and every offer aimed at them assumes they have nothing, or assumes they have a team.
Both assumptions insult them, and neither one helps.
CyberBackstop was built for the middle: capable people, under-resourced, doing the work. They don’t need a rescue. They don’t need a maturity model that tells them they’re a Level 1. They need more hours, specialties they don’t hold, and somebody to check the work who didn’t do the work.
THE NAME
Why we’re named after a screen.
A backstop is the tall screen behind home plate. It has no glory in it. It doesn’t catch the pitch — the catcher does — and it’s never the reason a team wins.
What it does is specific: it’s there for everything the catcher doesn’t get. The pitch in the dirt. The one that tips off the glove. Nobody plans around the backstop, and every ballpark has one, because a catcher who has to worry about what’s behind them plays worse than a catcher who doesn’t.
That’s the whole company. Your people are behind the plate. They’re doing the catching. We’re the thing behind them that means a miss costs you a moment instead of a season — and that lets them play further forward, because someone is covering the space they can’t watch.
We picked a name for the supporting role on purpose. Plenty of firms will offer to be your security team. We’d rather be the reason yours is better.
HOW WE WORK
Four things that don’t change
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Your team is the protagonist.
Every deliverable is written for your people to own, present, and maintain. When we build something, we build it at the size you can actually operate, and we hand over the editable file. If our departure would break your program, we did the job badly.
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Plain language, including when it’s bad news.
No severity theatre, no risk score with a decimal point pretending to be a measurement, and no findings padded to justify a fee. If something is fine, we say it’s fine. If something is going to fail the audit, you hear that in week two, not in the report.
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We’re paid by you and nobody else.
No vendor commissions, no resale margin, no referral fees, no partner tiers. Every tool recommendation, every “you don’t need that,” and every “your current provider is doing fine” costs us nothing to say honestly.
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Small enough that you know who’s on your account.
You get named people, and the person on the first call is the person in the weekly session. Nothing is handed to a delivery team you haven’t met.
THE BACKGROUND
Who’s behind it
CyberBackstop is a small practice, by design. The work is done by senior practitioners who have built and run security programs and sat on both sides of an audit — the side assembling the evidence and the side being asked for it. That second view is most of what we’re selling: knowing what a control looks like when it’s being read by someone whose job is to find the hole in it.
We don’t publish a maturity model and we don’t have a proprietary methodology. What we have is judgement about which of the hundred things in front of your team actually matters this quarter, and the discipline to tell you which ninety don’t.
FAMILY
Part of a small family of firms
CyberBackstop is a sister brand of CyberMint, alongside Tartan Cyber. Related firms, separate work, different position on the field.
Find out if we’re useful to you.
Forty-five minutes, no deck. Tell us what your team owns and where it’s thin, and we’ll tell you plainly whether we help.