25 April 2026 · 4 min read
The high-leverage six
SSO with enforced MFA, least-privilege access reviewed quarterly, automated dependency scanning, encrypted backups with tested restores, secret management outside the repository, and a written incident plan.
Together these take a few weeks of setup and cover the majority of realistic risk for an early-stage company.
Restores, not backups
An untested backup is a hypothesis. Schedule a restore drill, measure how long it takes, and write the number down.
Most teams discover their recovery time is several times what they assumed.
Have the plan before the incident
Who declares an incident, who communicates, and what the customer message says — decided calmly in advance, not at 2am.
A one-page plan with names and phone numbers is worth more than a policy document nobody has read.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing security hardening for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us