Ask a five-person startup how they handle cybersecurity compliance and you’ll usually get one of two answers: a confident rundown of their SOC 2 timeline, or a slightly panicked “wait, we need to handle what now?”
The truth of the matter is that cybersecurity represents a big upfront investment in terms of time and money, and it’s tempting to overlook it in those early days because “we’re not big enough to attract hackers”.
But any company, whether it’s a one-person-show or a massive conglomerate, is a target, and cybersecurity needs to be a priority from day 1.
They pick a framework
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First, they need to know what framework they need to meet, whether it’s SOC 2 or GDPR or, for international companies, a combination.
Founders who skip this step and start buying security tools first will find themselves buried under a pile of different dashboards that don’t map to anything an auditor actually asked for. It’s a waste of time and money.
They handle pentest reporting from the beginning
Pentest reporting is, put simply, the process of testing a company’s digital defenses against the kinds of attacks and methodologies cybercriminals can (and will) deploy against them. It’s the most effective way of demonstrating to auditors that you are investing genuine attention into your system security, because it’s actual proof that you’re stress-testing yourself in a way that reflects real-world threats.
While a written policy says what you intend to do, a pentest report says what actually happened when someone tested it and what got fixed afterward. Auditors notice the difference, and so do enterprise customers running their own vendor risk reviews.
They choose to outsource their tech team
A ten-person company rarely has budget for a dedicated security hire, so a lot of the actual work gets outsourced: a fractional or virtual CISO, an external pentesting team that revisit the company’s systems annually, an outside firm that manages the SOC 2 audit, and a freelance policy writer who drafts the documents the company doesn’t have the time to write for itself.
Compliance work is sometimes highly demanding and sometimes a case of letting the systems do the work under lighter supervision, and paying a full-time salary for a role that sits idle most of the year just doesn’t make fiscal sense.
Anyone who works in a startup will attest to the fact that ‘being busy’ takes on a whole new meaning. With emails, Telegrams, texts, Slacks, Teams messages and (probably) carrier pigeons flying their way every minute of the day and night, it’s incredibly easy for even a savvy entrepreneur to fall victim to a social engineering attack.
Phishing techniques are getting increasingly sophisticated, and startup founders – who meet and deal with a lot of relative strangers throughout those early years – can be vulnerable to giving the wrong piece of information to a highly convincing bad actor.
Training and education is the only way around this – don’t assume you’re immune.