A Security Baseline Every Small Team Can Actually Hit
Small teams tend to treat security as something that starts when a customer sends a questionnaire. By then it is remediation under deadline pressure, which is the most expensive way to do it. The alternative is not a security department. It is six controls applied consistently from the start.
The six that matter most
- Single sign-on with enforced multi-factor authentication on every system that holds customer data.
- Role-based access control with a quarterly review of who still needs what — most breaches start with an account that should have been closed.
- Dependency scanning in CI, blocking merges on critical vulnerabilities rather than filing a ticket nobody reads.
- Encryption at rest and in transit with a documented key rotation policy you have actually rehearsed.
- Centralised, immutable audit logging so you can reconstruct what happened rather than guessing.
- A written incident response plan naming real people, tested once a year with a tabletop exercise.
Review it on a schedule, not on an incident
Put a recurring ninety-minute meeting in the calendar every quarter. Walk the access list, check the scanner output, confirm the backups restore, and re-read the incident plan. The whole thing takes an afternoon a year and it is the difference between answering a security questionnaire in a day and losing a month to it.
The vendors who win enterprise deals are rarely the ones with the best security. They are the ones who can prove what they do, quickly, from a document that already exists.
