A deeper look at how I work with higher education leaders on cybersecurity strategy.
I’m Chris Schreiber. After more than 25 years leading technology and information security programs in and around education institutions, I launched CampusCISO to build a Strategic Operating System for higher education.
I help CIOs and CISOs escape the 'Audit Trap' by giving them a proven framework to benchmark risk, validate budget, and govern with confidence.
CampusCISO® is the methodology and membership model.
Cyber Heat Map® is the engine -- the platform that turns manual assessments into live roadmaps.
Cyber Bridge® is the alliance -- the community where leaders validate their strategies.
Think of it this way: CampusCISO is the System, Cyber Heat Map is the Tool, and Cyber Bridge is the Network that ties it all together.
I spent most of my career in the same seat as my clients. I grew tired of watching smart people burn time on low value tasks.
As a CISO and technology leader in higher education, I saw talented teams drown in audits, spreadsheets, and one‑off reports while real capability gaps lingered. The 80/20 rule was inverted. Most of their energy went into justifying budgets and documenting controls, not into completing the handful of activities that would move the needle to support teaching, research, and student services.
I also saw how much effort went into homegrown benchmarking. People call peers, run informal surveys, and try to guess what “good” looked like for their boards. I knew a simple, consistent assessment and planning framework could produce those insights much more quickly and reliably.
CampusCISO, Cyber Heat Map, and Cyber Bridge grew out of that frustration. I wanted to turn three decades of experience leading higher education cybersecurity programs into something repeatable, practical, and affordable, so CIOs and CISOs could stop reinventing the wheel and spend more of their limited time on activities that actually protect their institutions.
The idea had been in the back of my mind for years, but the turning point was during the COVID‑19 pandemic.
I had recently started a new CISO role and found myself living in video calls: back‑to‑back meetings, constant fire drills, and very little time for the deep, structural work I knew would actually help.
At the same time, I was sketching out ideas for streamlined assessment methodologies (spreadsheets, scoring models, frameworks) that could help any institution make smarter decisions, but there was never time to polish them.
At some point I realized two things:
So I left the comfort of a fulltime university CISO role and turned my half-finished ideas about planning methods into Cyber Heat Map, wrapped it in a guided membership model with CampusCISO, and built Cyber Bridge as the peer alliance around it. I wanted to move beyond 'renting a CISO' to empowering the team you already have.
I want to be known as the architect who helped higher ed leaders stop 'investing blindly' and start governing with data.
If people say that:
…then I will feel like I did the right work.
Most of the time, my primary contact is the college or university CIO who is accountable for cybersecurity but not living in it all day.
They’re experienced leaders who:
Sometimes these CIOs have a strong CISO on staff. Sometimes they have a small security team, a part‑time lead, or nobody in a formal CISO role. Either way, they know that cybersecurity spend is scattered across the entire IT portfolio, not just a line item called “security,” and they want an easier way to see the big picture.
I also work with higher education CISOs, often when they are new to the CISO role or new to higher education. With them, the engagement looks more like strategic partnership: implementing the CampusCISO framework to sequence projects, validate decisions, and navigate board expectations.
I’m not a good fit for institutions that want to hand off responsibility instead of sharpening their own cybersecurity decision‑making.
More specifically, I'm not a good fit for prospects seeking:
Most new customers come to me when the stakes feel high and the path forward feels unclear.
Some common triggers include:
In all of these cases, what prospects are really looking for is a calm, experienced partner and a simple way to get to “here’s what we’ll do next and why.”
I help leaders turn scattered cybersecurity work into a clear, living plan they can actually maintain, regardless of the size of their team or budget.
Most institutions already have:
What they usually don’t have is a shared, data‑informed roadmap that says:
My work focuses on:
For institutions in the Guided Membership, the CampusCISO model becomes a force multiplier for their leadership team: quarterly strategy reviews, peer validation, and data-driven decision support without the overhead of a full-time executive.
A few things:
Frameworks are useful, but they’re not a strategy.
Many organizations quietly let auditors and frameworks drive their plan. Board conversations become a tour of findings and checkboxes instead of a discussion about whether the institution has the capabilities it needs.
My approach:
When working with clients in Cyber Heat Map, I care less about “Did we answer this control with a yes or no?” and more about “Given what we’ve deployed, are we in a good position to comply and respond?” Compliance becomes a byproduct of building the right capabilities, not the headline.
In higher education, “best” matters less than “best fit in the portfolio.”
Almost all cybersecurity vendors can provide some value.
The real question is:
A tool that’s “objectively superior” in a vacuum may be the wrong choice if it consumes 80% of the security budget and overlaps with three existing solutions.
I encourage institutions to stop issuing RFPs in isolation and start managing cybersecurity as an interconnected portfolio. That means making tradeoffs at the portfolio level, not just picking winners in each category. It also means intentionally balancing cybersecurity investments across all technology functions, not just the line items managed by "security".
It’s not about building a theoretically perfect stack. It’s about maximizing the impact of a very constrained budget across the whole security landscape in a way the institution can actually sustain.
If you join as a CampusCISO Member, you should expect:
Even if you only read my blogs and other free content, my goal is that you gain a clearer mental model and at least one practical step you can apply immediately inside your institution.
The shift I care most about is moving from “we’re always behind” to “we know exactly where we stand and what to do next.”
In practice, that looks like moving:
It’s not just about better plans. It’s about leaders feeling more grounded, less defensive, and more in control of how their institutions approach cybersecurity.
A few things:
I’ve spent years at the intersection of two worlds:
From that combined perspective, two unique philosophies have emerged:
That mix of agile thinking, “less is more,” and progress over perfection shows up in how I designed the Strategic Operating System, built the Cyber Heat Map®, and guide our Members.
People come to me with “what’s next” questions:
I’m fairly hands‑on with technology. I like piloting new cybersecurity products, building internal tools with low‑code and NoSQL platforms, and exploring AI in my own work and for clients.
So when people want a grounded read on emerging tech (how it might fit, what could go wrong, and whether it deserves attention given their constraints) they tend to ask me.
You can count on calm, practical, vendor‑neutral guidance.
No hype. No fear‑mongering. No “Top 10 tools you must buy now.”
My goals are simple:
If a piece of content doesn’t do at least one of those things, it probably won’t make it out of my drafts folder.
