Practical security, risk and resilience for scaling companies

Security at this stage is a small number of things done properly

Scaling companies rarely fail a security review because of an exotic gap. They fail because the basics are undocumented, unowned or inconsistently applied, and inconsistency reads as risk to anyone assessing you. The work is to put a defensible baseline in place, make it somebody's job, and be able to show it.

The baseline worth having

• Know what you hold and where. A written record of the data you process, which systems hold it, and which of it is customer data. Not a formal register — a page that is true. Nearly everything else depends on it.
• Identity and access. Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and a real answer to who can reach production and who removed them when they left. Joiner and leaver steps somebody actually performs beat a policy describing them.
• Change control engineers will keep. Reviewed changes, one deployment path, separated environments. A control that makes shipping materially worse gets routed around, and a routed-around control is worse than none because it makes you believe something untrue.
• Logging you would actually look at. Enough to reconstruct what happened, retained long enough to be useful, somewhere an attacker with one set of credentials cannot quietly edit.
• Supplier risk. Every third party touching customer data, what it touches, and who owns the relationship.
• Incident response short enough to read during an incident. Who to call, who decides, who tells the customer, and where the plan lives when the systems it describes are down.

Resilience, not just security

The question a serious buyer or regulator asks is not only whether you can be broken into. It is whether you can keep operating, and whether you would notice. That means environment segregation, a recovery path somebody has actually tested, and change practices that reduce self-inflicted incidents — which, at this stage, are far more common than attacks.

Security leadership without a full-time hire

Most companies at Seed to Series B need senior security judgement long before they need a permanent security leader: someone to set the baseline, own the risk decisions, sit in the buyer conversations that get technical, and coach the engineer who has ended up carrying this alongside their real job. That is the shape of the work here, and it is designed to hand over to an internal owner as the company grows into one.

What we do not claim

We are not a certification body, an audit firm or a penetration-testing provider, and we do not hold or issue certifications on your behalf. Where testing or certification is needed we will tell you, help you scope it and work with the firm that does it. Being clear about that boundary is part of the job: the fastest way to fail a review is to have claimed something you cannot show.

Whether this is the right fit

How the security work is sequenced

In rough order of how much each step buys you, because each one makes the next cheaper.

Common questions