Alex Circei
If you’re a tech company offering anyone a service, somewhere in your future is a security assessment giving you the seal of approval to manage clients’ data and operate on your devices. No one takes security lightly anymore. The business costs of cyberattacks have now hit an all-time high. Government bodies, companies and consumers need the assurance that the next software they download isn’t going to be an open door for hackers.
For good reason, security certifications like the SOC 3 really put you through the wringer. My company, Waydev, has just attained the SOC 3 certification, becoming one of the first development analytics tools to receive that accreditation. We learned so much from the process, we felt it was right to share our experience with others that might be daunted by the prospect.
As a non-tech founder, it was hard not only to navigate the process, but to appreciate its value. But by putting our business caps on, our team was able to optimize our approach and minimize the time and effort needed to achieve our goal. In doing so, we were granted SOC 3 compliance in two weeks, as opposed to the two months it takes some companies.
We also turned the assessment into an opportunity to better our product, align our internal teams, boost our brand and even launch partnerships.
So here’s our advice on how teams can smoothly reach an SOC 3 while simultaneously balancing workloads and minimizing disruption to users.
First, bring your teams on board
As a founder, you’ll be acting as captain steering a ship into that SOC 3 port, and you’ll need all members of your crew to join forces. This isn’t a job for a specially designated security team alone and will require deep involvement from your development and other teams, too. That might lead to internal resistance, as they still have a full-time job tending to your product and customers.
That’s why it’s so important to start by being crystal clear with your employees about what this process will mean to their work lives. However, they have to embrace the true benefits that will arise. SOC 3 will immediately raise your brand’s appeal and likely see new customers come in as a result.
Each employee will also come out the other end with well-honed cybersecurity skills — they’ll have a deep understanding of potential cyber threats to the company, and all security initiatives will carry a far lighter burden. There’s also the sense of pride and fulfillment that comes with having an indisputable edge over your competitors.
In terms of the disruption to their work days, to start, your teams will be designating about 80-100 hours a month to work toward the certification. Those hours will go into carrying out more code reviews, doing security training and adapting the onboarding process for new hires.
Because we can’t expect employees to stack those hours on top of their regular workdays, as a leader you have to accept — and communicate — that the speed of your output will inevitably decrease. It’s important to state the quality of regular work shouldn’t drop, just the quantity. And it’s key to make it clear to everyone that this is a reasonable trade-off for more robust security, and the incremental benefits to the company and staff once the certification is approved.
When we decided to apply for the SOC 3 certification, we immediately communicated our intentions to the entire company, and as we laid the groundwork for the internal changes to come, we kept regular points of contact with our teams along the way.
Much like a development sprint, we had daily and weekly checklists around our security goals to track momentum. Each cycle focused on a specific area of SOC 3 compliance, such as internal controls, confidentiality, privacy and availability. By leveraging a workflow structure that our teams were already familiar with, we were able to quickly and efficiently make progress.
Get your house in order
As your teams gear up for the months ahead, spring clean your business’ security practices thoroughly. Collect as much data as possible to assess the state of your existing cybersecurity protection, and review the security tools being used. Then, try to address as many weak points as you can before starting the certification. The more you tackle in the early stages, the faster and less arduous the process will be.
While it is easier, it’s not enough to let external tools tell you how healthy your security infrastructure is. Ideally, you’ll be building or leveraging your own tools to carry out internal assessments beyond what auditing software can do. That in-house insight is essential to viewing each issue through the context of your company’s growth aims and making sure you provide the best-in-class security when it comes to customer data.
Your team also needs a basic understanding of today’s cybersecurity threats and what they can expect in the future. For this, it’s useful to assign a couple of key employees the task of staying up to date with cybersecurity trends and strategies. There are plenty of blogs and resources to help them do so.
Finally, start adapting your culture to integrate SOC 3 practices by making sure employees understand how to maintain compliance while implementing technical testing, policy revisions and EWS checks.
Leverage partnerships with cybersecurity tools
You don’t need to embark on this process alone, and in fact, it can end up sealing highly advantageous partnerships for your business in the long run. As you assess your business’ shortcomings and security gaps, start reaching out to organizations that will facilitate your journey.
Waydev teamed up both with a third-party compliance company and the security company Vanta. The company was part of our network following their Y Combinator days, but they were initially too costly to partner with. But, as other scaling startups will also find, as we moved toward SOC 3, we also began taking on bigger clients, giving us more revenue to spend on buttressing an impeccable security system.
So we used Vanta to automate our security and compliance monitoring, and gathered most of the evidence needed to prove we were compliant with SOC 3. Considering how time and resource-intensive SOC 3 already is, it’s a lifeline to be able to automate and streamline certain processes. It’s well worth investing in tools that will connect to your tool set and create dashboards that highlight the tasks required to attain SOC 3.
SOC 3 doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds. If you prepare well, rally your team and bring partners on board, you’ll be able to appreciate the golden opportunities that the certification will offer your startup in the long run.
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