Small businesses grow into enterprises, and their security requirements change as a result. What worked well for a 10-person company will not be adequate as they scale to 100 or 1,000 employees. Just like the organization itself, security frameworks have to grow and become more yet constantly remain simple to use.
And, to a lesser extent, this article highlights crucial security precautions to hold back for fast-growing companies. It ranges from identity and access management, data protection to threat monitoring, incident response plans, and compliance. It focuses on pragmatic steps that organizations can take to scale security in an affordable way, not impeding growth.
Identity and Access Management
One of the first security capabilities to evaluate as a company grows is identity and access management (IAM). Early on, most employees can access most systems and data. Security is managed at the application level, if at all. However, more rigorous IAM becomes essential at scale.
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Implementing an IAM system provides centralized control over access to applications and infrastructure. This improves security posture while also enabling automation and self-service. Core capabilities of IAM include:
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Centralized directory – Stores identity profiles for all internal and external users
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Authentication – Verifies identity before granting access
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Authorization – Applies access rules and rights for applications/data
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Single sign-on (SSO) – Enables one login for multiple applications
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Provisioning/deprovisioning – Automates account setup and removal
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Role-based access control (RBAC) – Assigns access levels based on roles
When companies get to 100+ employees, it becomes impossible to manage access manually over all systems. The information is centralized in a single control plane in an IAM system. It also enables the enforcement of the access policies programmatically, i.e., employees are allowed to access only the applications and data as per their role.
The best practice is to centralize identity management as early as possible so that it does not become unmanageable. Cloud-based IAM solutions are easy to scale and have usage-based pricing, which makes them economical in the early stage of growth.
Data Protection
Protecting sensitive data is another priority for fast-growing organizations. Data like customer details, financials, product designs, and other intellectual property (IP) are crown jewels requiring extra security.
As businesses scale to 100+ people, data protection can no longer rely just on trust and responsible usage alone. The risks of leakage, theft, or loss grow exponentially. Some best practices include:
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Classifying data by sensitivity level (public, internal, confidential, etc.)
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Encrypting confidential data at rest and in motion
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Rights limiting access to sensitive data to only those who need it
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Deploying data loss prevention (DLP) systems to detect risky data usage
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Establishing data backup and recovery safeguards
Having data classification standards and encryption allows securing sensitive data at scale while keeping other information readily accessible for the business. Doing this early while data volumes are manageable reduces long-term risk.
Automated monitoring and prevention capabilities like DLP further let organizations identify and stop risky data behavior as it evolves. This can prevent issues like the use of unapproved cloud apps, accidental public sharing, or theft by departing employees.
Backup and recovery technology is also key for the availability and integrity of business-critical data against ransomware, storage failures, or disasters. This enables restoring data in the event of any incidents.
Threat Monitoring and Response
The digital attack surface grows with the company. The more employees, devices, networks, cloud services, and applications, the more exposure. Small businesses will see a few dozen security alerts a day, whereas large enterprises will see hundreds of thousands.
Advanced attacks require the ability to monitor and respond to threats for their identification and defense. Security information and event management (SIEM), endpoint detection and response (EDR), as well as managed detection and response (MDR) are some of these core components.
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SIEM aggregates activity data across infrastructure for consolidated monitoring
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EDR monitors endpoints like servers and employee devices for local threats
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MDR provides 24/7 threat hunting and incident response by experts
Together, these provide comprehensive visibility across networks, cloud, applications, and devices to detect attacks in progress. Advanced analytics identify threats missed by other controls based on behavior anomalies and attack pattern matching.
Once threats are detected, organizations must have processes to quickly investigate and contain incidents before they become breaches. This requires coordination between IT security, IT operations, legal, and executives guided by an incident response plan.
Tabletop exercises should be used to validate and refine response plans. After incidents, they should need to enhance further key lessons in threat detection and protection. In the end, organizations want to reduce the gap between when a threat is detected and when it is contained over time.
Regulatory Compliance
With the growth in business footprint and data collection, coming with time are compliance considerations. It may be startups that are exempt from, but enterprise scale activates the number of regulatory requirements.
Some major compliance frameworks include:
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PCI DSS for companies processing credit card payments
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HIPAA for healthcare companies or partners
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SOX for public companies
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GDPR for EU citizen data
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CCPA for California consumer data
Achieving compliance requires a concerted effort across security, IT, legal, finance, and other groups. Major aspects include data protections, access controls, activity monitoring, policy management, and audits.
Non-compliance exposes organizations to major financial penalties and reputational damage. It can also inhibit business partnerships or expansion plans.
The most pragmatic approach is building foundational security capabilities that map to common compliance controls out of the gate. Even if formal certification is not yet mandated, Building foundational security capabilities that map to common compliance controls from the outset is the most pragmatic approach.
As specific regulations kick in, compliance efforts can focus more on audits and certification rather than major security changes. You want to prepare for the final destination before embarking on the journey.
Scaling the Security Team
Of course, the technology and processes supporting these security foundations require skilled people to handle implementation and ongoing management. The security team must grow in capabilities and capacity as the business scales.
Expanding the team can come through a combination of hiring and outsourcing:
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Core leadership roles are best kept in-house to maintain vision, strategy, and execution accountability. This may expand from a single CISO to distributed teams across identity, data, applications, endpoints, etc.
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Many platform implementation or ongoing monitoring tasks can be effectively outsourced to managed security service providers. This avoids inflated and hard-to-hire specialized staffing.
Balance is important for a cost-optimized team that maintains focus on business-specific security priorities.
Regardless of specific roles, look to build a collaborative security culture across the broader technology and business organization. Security should be everyone’s responsibility – not just a separate, isolated function. Find opportunities to educate colleagues across other departments on risks and community protection behaviors.
Financial Planning for Security Spend
Of course, all these security capabilities and teams entail significant financial investment. It’s important for leadership to take a data-driven approach to security spending tied directly to business growth.
A recommended starting point is dedicating 10% of the overall IT budget to security needs. From there, scale security investments relative to business expansion to balance risk mitigation with the enablement of growth opportunities.
It’s also important to design security architecture for prevention first before considering insurance offerings. Transferring risk should only come after internal controls are mature. Cyber insurance carriers require rigorous controls testing before approving policies.
Model security finances over many years. Take a look at the front cost of the platform and any ongoing operations expenses. Maximizing maturity with business growth can be achieved by optimizing funding over time.
The ROI of security investments comes from avoided costs-losses that would occur from incidents as well as lack of trust inhibiting business partnerships. A 500k security investment that helps avoid a single 10M breach provides massive ROI. It’s worth being prudent rather than reactive.
Executive Engagement
Executive awareness and support across the journey is required to scale security. In spite of this, leaders are required to be on board with roadmaps, track progress, and track risks.
Thus, they can help support resource needs, air cover difficult tradeoffs, and communicate priorities throughout the bigger organization.
Establish security updates as standing agenda items in board meetings and executive sessions. Ensure leaders understand basics like threats, controls, and compliance landscapes even if they don’t grasp technical details.
Facilitate anonymous feedback channels for them to provide guidance without hesitation. Ultimately their charter is managing business risk – make security transparency a pillar of good governance.
The CISO also needs a seat at the executive table for security to enable rather than hinder business goals. They should participate in strategy planning to inform expansion decisions with security and compliance considerations.
Conclusion
There is no need for the journey from the protection of startups to that of enterprises to be daunting. Foundation in those capacities of IAM, Data, and Threat primes the pump for cohesive programs tied to company growth.
It helps with avoiding reactive spending in the future by balancing prudent financial investment for security platforms and teams. Above all, leaders at all levels of the business must be involved in transparent security governance and be supportive and guiding their company to new heights.
