Cybersecurity for Startups

STARTUPS ARE BUILT ON ACCELERATED GROWTH

Startups everywhere are racing to grow as fast as possible with scalable ideas that let them take off and raise capital to keep growing. Each type of startup has its own characteristics, from FinTech and HealthTech to many others, but what they all share is the implicit risk they are exposed to.

Dancing with chaos

Many describe working at a startup as the art of dancing with chaos, because there is genuinely a lot of uncertainty and many things can go wrong. To survive it you need the ability to fail, adapt, recover and keep moving forward (as fast as possible).

But there are many other kinds of risk. Most commonly, your startup depends on some platform that lets you run a business that can scale. That platform will be within reach of as many people as possible: some will be your potential customers, and others will be people after your money or your customers' money.

Let's think for a moment about the following risks of platforms exposed on the internet:

• Theft of sensitive data for extortion.
• Harm to third parties through your platform.
• Tampering with mobile apps publicly available on the Apple and Google stores.
• Abuse of the web services that mobile apps connect to.
• Unauthorized access into web applications.
• Security breaches that affect the privacy or data of people in your country or other regions.
• Media scandals or lawsuits caused by cybersecurity breaches.

Accelerated growth has this interesting characteristic:

Building a minimum viable product (MVP) means skipping over many things, because the goal is to create the smallest possible thing that can validate whether your idea is attractive to your potential customers.

Having a minimum viable (sellable) product means it will lack robust performance features, infrastructure complexity and, of course, security. If it already includes all of that then it is not an MVP, and you probably spent far too long building something you don't yet know will work.

The startup that reaches "Product Market Fit"

Every startup dreams of finding that magic recipe that generates revenue, the famous "Product Market Fit". But reaching it, or believing you are about to reach it, brings new challenges, and one of them is cybersecurity.

The most obvious way to think about it: just as you protect the home you worked so hard to acquire, you should also look for ways to protect the money-making machine that will feed you and many other people. That protection means building cybersecurity into your startup, and just as there are several ways to protect your home, there are several ways to protect your startup.

Let's look at some examples:

• Running penetration testing also known as "Pentest" or "ethical hacking", these are the reviews commonly used to make sure web or mobile applications cannot be abused by criminals.
• Having policies, standards and procedures aligned with respected industry frameworks such as SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA or ISO 27001 is another common requirement that some of your business partners will ask for.
• Running security awareness training together with proactive validation exercises such as Red Team campaigns helps simulate what would happen in a real attack. It's like running a fire drill so you know how to react if it ever happens.
• Running periodic security reviews can generate a significant amount of work to resolve (risks), and without a proper vulnerability management process, it can snowball into something hard to control.
• Startups in particular are agile companies that need agile solutions to their problems, and there are automation trends such as DevSecOps that help reduce costs through automation of security reviews.

Traditional consulting models tend to be expensive, slow and complicated because they involve manually managed processes. Startups should look for more agile solutions that let them meet every requirement as quickly and simply as possible. Companies like WhiteJaguars offer services built precisely for these scenarios, from penetration testing to automated vulnerability management based on platforms built for DevSecOps and much more.

WhiteJaguars is a cybersecurity startup that knows what startups need

Many startups across the US, UK, Canada and Silicon Valley already use WhiteJaguars services to protect their future, comply with regulations, and close business agreements quickly and easily.