editione1.0.0
Updated October 9, 2023The more successful your company, the more people you need to keep it moving. Not only will the number of people increase, but also the range of experience levels, skill sets, and roles.
While you may have started as a small group of friends or early employees who knew each other well enough to trust deeply and quickly, before long you will struggle to remember the names of your new team members and may even no longer be involved directly in hiring them.
This can introduce the following security challenges:
Hiring risk. Without consistent processes and checks, you may hire someone who poses a risk to your organization. Whether they are willfully malicious or just not very good at what they do, ensuring that all new team members have background and reference checks can reduce this risk.
Oversight risk. The more people you have the harder it is to keep track of what is happening around the company. This can introduce risk from common insider crimes such as fraud, as well as more complex risks from bad decisions. Ensuring you have robust checks and processes for your key financial systems and those storing highly sensitive data is crucial, as is encouraging and embedding feedback and review processes in significant decisions.
You are selling more, you are serving more customers, and there are way more “things to do” in your world that you could possibly imagine. The more you grow, the faster you go. Whether that is truth or perception, it doesn’t matter—your world is not slowing down anytime soon.
This can introduce the following security challenges:
Monitoring and spotting issues. Have you ever been working so hard and going so fast that when you finally come up for air you are surprised by how far you have come? That’s common when we are pushing hard and scaling. This focus (required to succeed when growing) can also lead to a tunnel vision where we don’t notice what is going on around us. As the team grows, this problem gets worse, as it’s now more and more difficult to get to all the meetings, meet with all the project teams, and understand what is getting done around you every day. All of this means that issues can crop up unexpectedly and you may not notice—including security ones.