About
The technology leadership your business needs — on demand.
I'm Christopher Russo, a fractional CTO for growing businesses. I bring the strategy, security judgment, and AI direction of a chief technology officer — honed over 13+ years leading technology and security inside a $40 billion hedge fund — without the full-time salary, and without replacing the IT team or MSP you already trust. No hype, no jargon, no fear-selling. Just clear thinking that makes your business more secure and more profitable.
For 13 years, I led technology, security, and vendor operations inside a $40 billion hedge fund — an environment where downtime, a security gap, or a failed audit simply weren't options. I owned a multimillion- dollar IT budget, held roughly twenty vendors and outsourced providers to their commitments, and answered to executives, investors, and auditors who wanted straight answers, not jargon.
Today I bring that same standard to growing businesses. Through my practice, Russo Risk Management, I work as a fractional CTO for owners across financial services, insurance, and professional services — setting technology strategy, hardening security, and guiding AI adoption, without the cost of a full-time executive and without displacing the IT team or MSP you already trust.
My roots are in risk. I've directed the remediation of firmwide penetration tests, supported investor due-diligence and audits, and run identity, access, and endpoint security to enterprise standards across Microsoft 365, Azure / Entra ID, and AWS. The most valuable thing I do isn't technical at all: I translate technical risk into plain language, so you can make confident decisions about money and exposure.
And I'm hands-on with AI right now — designing multi-step agent workflows with Claude and the OpenAI API to automate real work, and writing the AI-use policies that keep it safe. Every recommendation I make has to pass one test: does it make you more secure, more profitable, or both?
Track record
Enterprise pedigree, owner-friendly delivery.
13+ yrs
Leading financial-services IT & security
$40B
Hedge fund — technology, security & vendor ops
~20
Vendors & MSPs managed on a $3.1M IT budget
400+
Endpoints secured to CIS / zero-trust standards
Certifications
Verified profile
How I work
A few principles I don't bend on.
ROI over hype
If a tool or idea doesn’t pay for itself in time or money, it doesn’t make the plan. Period.
Plain language
No acronym soup. You’ll always understand what we’re doing and why it matters to your bottom line.
Start small, prove it
We win early with a focused, high-impact fix — then expand from a place of trust and results.
Own your systems
I document everything and build for handoff. You should never be held hostage by your own technology.
Let's talk strategy.
Book a call. In one conversation, you'll get a straight, plain-language read on where you're exposed, where you're leaking money, and what to do first.