Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

If you’re a founder or engineering leader at a growing startup, you’re probably familiar with this tension: You need compliance like SOC 2 to close deals, but earning it pulls your team away from building your product. ‍ For example, manual SOC 2 prep forces engineers to spend weeks collecting screenshots, tracking down documentation, and responding to auditors instead of shipping features.

For lean teams, ISO 27001 can feel like a lot to take on. You’re expected to set up a formal security program, assess risks, write and maintain a long list of policies, and have audit-ready proof on hand—often without a large security or compliance headcount. ‍ On top of that, manual work and outside consultants can get expensive fast, pulling founders, engineers, and operators away from building the product and growing the business.

Modern organizations depend on a vast network of third-party vendors to deliver their products and services, often outsourcing logistics like manufacturing and customer support. While this promotes scalability and innovation, relying on external parties can create blind spots in data security, regulatory compliance, and risk management. ‍ These gaps exist because vendors often don’t operate under the same policies and ethical standards as the organization with which they collaborate.

Financial institutions operate within intense restrictions. They can face extensive regulatory scrutiny around the world. For global or multinational institutions, compliance becomes a pressing and ongoing challenge as they must align with numerous regional cybersecurity regulations, each with its own reporting and governance expectations. ‍ The Cyber Risk Institute (CRI) Cyber Profile was developed to ease this compliance overhead for security teams in the finance industry.

AI adoption has accelerated across sectors today as the technology becomes easier to access and deploy. Most organizations embed it in at least one aspect of their daily operations, but doing so has also introduced new risks, such as model bias and outcome drift. ‍ There’s a growing gap between AI use and responsible oversight, and keeping up demonstrable AI governance practices is a challenge.

This past month, the Vanta team launched new features to help you with:‍

Organizations that work with the US government must adhere to strict procedures covering procurement protocols, non-discrimination policies, and rigorous cybersecurity. That’s because working with government agencies often involves handling sensitive and legally protected data, and failure to comply can result in financial and legal consequences.

As businesses continue to adopt new technologies and expand their digital ecosystem, about 72% of organizations report that overall security risks have never been higher. Access-related vulnerabilities, in particular, have emerged as one of the top cybersecurity concerns, since every new tool or system introduces additional access points, users, and permissions to manage.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union (EU) regulation that governs the handling of personal data belonging to individuals in the European Economic Area (EEA). It is considered one of the strictest data privacy regulations globally. ‍ If your organization processes the personal data of EU/EEA residents, complying with the GDPR is mandatory.

Due to growing awareness of data privacy risks, organizations face mounting pressure from regulators to safeguard sensitive personal information. This can be particularly challenging for US companies, which must adhere to both domestic regulations, such as the CCPA and HIPAA, as well as international frameworks in their target global markets.