Who This Book Is For

Whether you are just trying to protect yourself or your small business, we are excited to share the years of experience and advice that we have provided to people just like you. We hope you find helpful nuggets of wisdom in the advice for your own security that you feel inspired to share with others in your network, social circles, or family.

We believe this book will be helpful to people of a variety of backgrounds, but we do make some assumptions about your technical skill and security goals. We expect most readers to fall into one or more of the following buckets:

• You are at least mildly tech savvy, willing to learn more, and work somewhere where information security matters.

• You work at or own a startup and care about security.

• You work at or own a small or growing business and want to ensure your security strategy is strong.

For those running small businesses or growing companies, we wrote this book so it can grow with you—you might only be a one-person band now, but soon you might grow into a small team with more customers, assets, and risks you need to think about. We structured this book so you can revisit it again when your context changes, so you know where to best re-direct your small amount of resources to make the biggest impact.

Eventually, your organization may outgrow this book. There might be a point where you grow big enough to need your own internal security team. You may find the amount of data, assets, and systems you have is well past what you and your team alone can manage. Consider this book to be the roadmap to help you manage your security from now until then—so that you can reach that stage safely, and with strong security foundations already in place.

For those of you further along your security journey, this book can also be a tool to help share your practice with others—a way to guide those around you in a simple and pragmatic way. We hope this book can help you support these groups and your local communities and businesses, without spending too much of your time and energy.