Why you should get SOC 2 compliant much sooner
The case for investing early in compliance for B2B startups
Syft is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant as of last month! Why did a 1-year old startup like ours go through such a long process this early? Doesn’t it SOC 2 much, as they say?
One major reason you hear startups getting SOC 2 compliance is to win upmarket deals. In our experience, startups sell to other startups in the beginning and a majority of them don’t strictly require SOC 2 unless they are in a regulated space liked Fintech.
But our customers entrust us with user data that is covered by privacy laws. Quite frankly, we think SOC 2 and CPRA/GDPR compliance should be table stakes in the GTM/martech space. We owe it to our customers and so we made it a priority.
There were some other pros of getting this process done early:
🔐 It signals that we think of security and privacy of customer data as “being integral to our service”. Even for customers who don’t strictly require SOC2, this is reassuring and a differentiator. When it is required, as sellers, there is one less objection to worry about.
🔄 The earlier you get started, the easier it is. The surface area and complexity of systems is smaller. Your team is smaller. It is much faster to audit and document risks, mitigate them, and make changes.
📋 You can bake in the best practices from the very beginning e.g. it helped us tighten up our onboarding/offboarding and access control processes and policies.
👨🏼💼 Between me and my co-founder, we wear multiple hats and it was great to recognize and formalize certain responsibilities and roles we had on the infosec and privacy front.
There were some minor inconveniences as well:
❎ SoC 2 is not just a pure ‘security’ framework. It encompasses things like employee performance management. We don’t have some of these setup yet, and so it took some time to document processes/policies that are not applicable at our stage.
🐢 If your technology stack is somewhat modern, it might not be natively supported for automated compliance monitoring. We use Vercel to host our application service which is not supported by most SOC 2 vendors. In the end, we used the usual screenshots for evidence but this slowed things down.
Despite these, we were able to finish the process in a reasonable time (it took us ~7 months) thanks to the agility of our engineering team.
If you are an early stage startup and on the fence, we strongly recommend getting this done earlier. Your customers, your engineering team, and your sales team will thank you for it!