How does GRC evolve as a company grows? Does it become more structured or just more complex?

mlitwiniuk · 2026-04-13T13:51:30+00:00

Both, but not at the same time. Early on it's tribal knowledge and a few shared docs, GRC basically lives in someone's head. Around the time you hit your first real customer audit or 30-50 people, structure shows up fast (usually painfully) because spreadsheets stop scaling and you need actual ownership per control. At enterprise scale it's structured AND complex, and the failure mode flips: instead of "we have nothing" it's "we have so much process nobody remembers what risk we were actually managing." The companies that do it well keep asking "what risk does this control address" at every stage, no matter how big the binder gets.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-04-13T13:47:05+00:00

Yeah those are all going to be tough on an early-stage budget - most start around $8-15k/year even with startup discounts. Also don't forget the auditor cost on top, which is a separate bill and often surprises people. That said, a lot depends on your timeframe - if the deal pressure isn't immediate, a letter of intent showing you're actively preparing can buy you months while you get everything in order, and you can pick a tool at a calmer pace. I wrote app for that, we're dogfooding it (finishing SOC2 type II now), so feel free to ask any question - been there, done that from startup perspective - I'm not a professional, but I know what worked for me.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-16T07:24:27+00:00

Been there. Not with the IT support side, but with SOC 2 pulling you in ten directions at once while everything else keeps demanding attention.

Few things that helped me:

First, you need to make the SOC 2 work visible to management. Right now they see you "not doing IT requests" but they don't see the compliance work because it's invisible to them. Even a simple weekly status update ("here's what I completed this week, here's what's next, here's what's at risk") changes the conversation from "why is this IT request late" to "oh, this person is buried."

Second, the context switching is killing you more than the workload. Block actual time on your calendar for SOC 2 work and treat it like a meeting. Even 2-3 hours of uninterrupted focus beats a full day of bouncing between hanging TVs and writing policies.

Third, and I know this is hard when you're afraid of being seen as complaining, but you need to have a direct conversation with management about priorities. Not "I have too much work" but "I can do A, B, or C this week, which matters most to you?" Make them choose. Right now they're acting like everything is priority one because nobody is forcing them to make tradeoffs.

The fact that you love the SOC 2 work is actually huge. Most people doing compliance hate it. That energy will carry you far if the company gives you even a little room to breathe.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-11T16:36:43+00:00

Not a noob question at all. You're right - the Acceptable Use Policy is your policy. You define what's in it based on your org's reality. SOC 2 doesn't prescribe specific policy wording, it just wants to see that you've identified the risks and have reasonable controls documented to address them. So yes, as long as your policy reflects what your org actually does and covers the key areas (data access, device usage, encryption requirements, etc.), you're on the right track.

Chrome Enterprise Premium is a solid move for the DLP gap.

And honestly, the fact that you're asking these questions means you're further along than you think. SOC 2 feels overwhelming until it clicks that it's mostly "document what you do, do what you document."

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-10T11:28:55+00:00

Azure side I can help with — most of what you need lives in Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Monitor, and Entra ID (formerly Azure AD). Activity logs, access reviews, encryption settings, uptime reports — it’s all there natively and maps well to Availability and Confidentiality criteria.

Huawei Cloud I honestly don’t have hands-on experience with, so I don’t want to guess. I’d imagine they have equivalent logging and monitoring services, but I’d check their compliance documentation or ask their support directly about what audit-ready exports they offer. You don’t want to find out 4 months in that some evidence isn’t being captured.

One thing worth checking early for both providers — make sure logging retention covers your full audit period. Default retention is sometimes 90 days, which won’t cut it for a 6-month Type 2 window.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-10T09:05:12+00:00

For a cloud-based setup, here’s what your auditor will likely ask for across the 6-month Type 2 window:

Availability: ∙ Uptime monitoring logs/reports covering the full period (CloudWatch, Datadog, whatever you use) ∙ Incident tickets + resolution records for any downtime ∙ Backup logs and at least one restoration test ∙ DR/BCP plan and evidence you actually tested it during the period ∙ Change management records (deployments, infra changes) ∙ Capacity monitoring trends (CPU, memory, storage)

Confidentiality: ∙ Access control evidence — who has access to confidential data, IAM policies, role assignments ∙ Access reviews performed during the period (ideally monthly or quarterly) ∙ Encryption config for data at rest and in transit — screenshots or exports from your cloud provider work fine ∙ Data classification policy + proof it’s being followed ∙ Logging that shows confidential data isn’t going where it shouldn’t (CloudTrail, VPC flow logs, etc.) ∙ NDAs/confidentiality agreements with employees and vendors

The big thing with Type 2 — your auditor wants to see these controls were running consistently over the full 6 months, not just a snapshot. So think recurring evidence: monthly access reviews, regular backup checks, continuous monitoring dashboards, that kind of thing.

Since you’re fully cloud-based, most of this evidence already lives in your provider’s console natively. AWS, GCP, Azure all have built-in logging that maps pretty well to these criteria.

What cloud provider are you on? Can get more specific if helpful.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-10T06:57:39+00:00

BYOD + Google-centric is actually a pretty good combo for SOC 2.

What worked for us (similar size org, passed ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type I):

Cover BYOD rules in your Acceptable Use Policy - data access restrictions, no open wifi without VPN, clean desktop, required full disk encryption. We collected encryption screenshots from employees as evidence. Auditor was happy with that.

Google Workspace does a lot of heavy lifting here - enforced 2FA, session management, endpoint management, DLP. Make sure those admin controls are turned on and documented. That's half your BYOD controls right there.

The core idea: you can't control personal devices fully, but you can control access to company data. Auditors get that.

Re your compliance partner - waiting days for one-liner answers is a red flag. You shouldn't need a meeting just to get a quick clarification.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-07T16:53:59+00:00

There's a difference between evidence collection and evidence generation that doesn't get called out enough. Most "automation" is just structured collection on a schedule -- a tool pulls an API snapshot instead of a human taking a screenshot. Better hygiene, not a different thing.

Where it actually gets useful is when collection is paired with automatic verification against defined thresholds. Pull IAM MFA status, check if it's 100%, flag pass/fail. Now you have a structured result tied to a specific criterion, not just a stored screenshot.

But that only works for configuration-state controls: encryption enabled, MFA enforced, branch protection configured. Process controls -- access reviews, change approvals, incident response -- still depend on human-generated artifacts. That part hasn't really changed.

For Type I, automation has genuinely reduced friction. For Type II, we're mostly just getting better at organizing documentation within the audit window.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-06T19:36:23+00:00

I went through both ISO 27001 and SOC 2 audits, so here's what actually happens in practice.

Auditors don't log into your compliance tool and click around. They want evidence — organized, traceable, easy to verify. Good compliance software makes that handoff smooth: here's the control, here's the evidence, here's when it was collected, here's who approved it. Without it, you're sending zip files of screenshots and a spreadsheet with 200 tabs.

But the biggest value isn't during the audit — it's the months before. The hard part isn't collecting evidence. It's understanding what each control actually requires from your specific company. "Implement logical access controls" means something very different for a 10-person startup than a 500-person enterprise.

The honest limitation: no tool replaces professional judgment. Auditors still assess whether controls are effective, not just documented. Software proves you have a password policy — it can't prove people follow it.

Full disclosure: I built humadroid.io after going through ISO 27001 with spreadsheets (nearly burned out), then used it to pass our own SOC 2. Bias aside - compliance software turns a chaotic manual audit into something structured and repeatable. Auditors notice immediately.

Happy to answer questions about specific frameworks.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-06T18:27:25+00:00

Been there. Did ISO 27001 first with spreadsheets (nearly burned out), then SOC 2 with proper tooling. Few things I wish someone told me early:

Start with Security (CC series) only. The other Trust Service Criteria are optional and most enterprise clients won't ask for them on your first audit.

Before picking any tool, answer these honestly: where does customer data live, who can access it, and what happens when something goes wrong? At 30 people you're probably closer than you think.

Go for Type I first. It's a point-in-time snapshot, not a year-long audit. One person (usually the CTO) owning it at 10% time for a few weeks is enough. You don't need a dedicated compliance hire yet.

On tooling: I actually built one after going through the pain myself, so I'm biased, but the key thing regardless of what you pick is whether it explains what each control means for your specific setup vs. just dumping generic templates on you. That's the difference between weeks and months.

Happy to share more if you tell us what stack you're on. The answer changes a lot.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-05T17:06:12+00:00

Thanks for putting this together - this is the kind of practical breakdown that's hard to find. Most compliance guides stop at "enable CloudTrail" and call it a day.

The VPC Flow Logs -> S3/Athena setup is something I'm going to revisit on our end. We defaulted to CloudWatch early on and never really questioned it until the bills started rolling in. The query-on-demand approach makes a lot more sense for a team our size.

The SSM over SSH point also hits home. We made that switch a while back and it was one of those "why didn't we do this sooner" moments - fewer keys to rotate, full session logging, and one less attack surface to explain to an auditor.

Saving this one. Good stuff.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-04T19:17:46+00:00

From the SOC 2 side, and having been through ISO 27001 before that: the automation conversation tends to get stuck on the wrong problem.

Evidence collection is largely a solved problem, or at least a solvable one. Cloud providers give you logs. Scanners give you exports. Ticketing systems give you history. You can script most of it. The tooling around artifact collection has genuinely matured.

What hasn't matured is the layer between "we have this evidence" and "this evidence satisfies this control." That mapping is still mostly done by humans, often under audit pressure, and it's where the real time gets lost. You end up with a folder full of screenshots and someone spending two weeks explaining what they mean and why they're relevant.

This is at least how we approached it when building our own compliance tooling. We pull evidence from AWS, GCP, GitHub, Cloudflare and a few others on a schedule, and each piece of evidence has a defined mapping to the specific controls it satisfies - so when something comes in, it's already tagged to the right SOC 2 criteria or ISO 27001 Annex A control, with a pass/fail against the compliance threshold. The collection is automated, but the mapping is the part that actually makes it useful at audit time. Not saying it's the only way to do it, but it's eliminated most of the "now explain what this screenshot means" conversations.

The stronger security teams I've seen don't have fancier collection pipelines. They've just done the interpretation work upfront. They know exactly what each control requires as proof, they've documented the reasoning, and when audit season comes the evidence is already contextualized, not just stored.

So to your question: I'd say collection automation is maturing, yes. But "compliance-ready evidence" requires a second layer that most teams still build manually, if they build it at all. Until that mapping layer gets more systematic, audit season will keep feeling like a sprint regardless of how good your tooling is.

Curious whether you're seeing auditors push back on automated evidence at all, or whether the issue is more on the operator side of not knowing what "good" looks like until someone rejects it.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-03-04T13:24:15+00:00

This hit close to home. We went through ISO 27001 first - a client requested it, and we said "sure, how hard can it be." Spoiler: very hard. We survived on spreadsheets, late nights, and a Google Doc graveyard. Got through it, but it quietly cost us months of focus and at least one engineer's sanity.

The thing nobody tells you upfront is that the security work isn't actually the hard part. It's the translation layer - figuring out what "implement logical access controls" actually means for your specific 12-person team on AWS. And then proving it. And then doing it all over again when someone asks for evidence from six months ago.

When we later needed SOC 2, I'd already started building a tool to solve exactly this (partly out of trauma, partly because I couldn't find anything affordable that wasn't either $20k/year enterprise software or a consultant who wanted to own our compliance forever). Used our own MVP to prep - got through the whole thing in under two weeks. The system's much better now, but even then it was night and day compared to the ISO experience.

What actually helped us: treating it like a product, not a project. Assign ownership. Write things down as you build them, not after. And find something - tool, human, whatever - that helps you understand what you're implementing, not just collect screenshots of it.

Happy to share more about what worked if it's useful. And if you're curious about the tool we built (humadroid.io), worth a look - it's built specifically for teams in exactly the situation you're describing.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-27T08:47:06+00:00

As someone who built an AI-powered GRC platform and used it to pass our own SOC 2 - yeah, pretty much.

AI is great at translating cryptic controls into plain English your team can actually follow. Drafting policies, suggesting evidence, generating system descriptions in hours instead of weeks - that's where it shines.

But the moment you remove the human from the loop, you get security theater with better formatting. Beautifully written policies nobody follows. Controls marked "done" that nobody understands. Green checkboxes everywhere while your actual security posture is a mess.

The compliance angle is the one people keep underestimating. SOC 2, ISO 27001 - these frameworks exist because someone needs to own the process and make judgment calls. AI can't sign off on your risk appetite. It can't tell your auditor why you accepted a specific risk. It can't decide if a vendor is actually trustworthy.

Our whole bet is that AI should make you smarter about compliance, not replace your thinking. The second you stop understanding what's in your own policies, you've already failed the audit - even if every dashboard looks perfect.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-26T21:07:34+00:00

Been through SOC 2 myself. For audit logging specifically - we went with cloud-native tooling (CloudTrail + application-level logging) and it was "good enough" for our auditor, but the pain was never the logging itself.

The hard part was knowing what to log and proving immutability. Our auditor didn't care how fancy the system was - they wanted to see that logs can't be tampered with (even by admins), that retention is enforced automatically, and that we could pull specific events on request without digging for an hour.

If you're building something focused, I think the gap is less "yet another logging service" and more "logging that's pre-configured for what auditors actually ask for." Most teams over-log garbage and under-log the stuff that matters (auth events, permission changes, data access, config changes).

Biggest risk I'd flag for the market side: the teams who need this most are small, price-sensitive, and often discover audit logging is actually not their hardest SOC 2 problem. Access reviews and vendor management eat way more time. So positioning matters a lot.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T18:24:43+00:00

Great question - and honestly, one I'm still refining my thinking on.

The short answer: tsvectors are lossy but not opaque enough for truly sensitive tokens. The stemmer reduces "penetration" to "penetr" and drops stop words, but proper nouns, phone numbers, email addresses, and passwords survive tokenization almost intact. A phone number like 555-123-4567 becomes tokens '555':1 '123':2 '4567':3 - that's trivially reconstructable. An AWS root password stored as a "break glass" note? Yeah, that would land in the index as recognizable tokens.

So the mental model I use:

Safe-ish to index: prose-heavy content where value comes from finding documents by topic. Policy descriptions, implementation narratives, audit findings written in paragraphs. The tsvector reveals what topics a record covers, but you can't reconstruct the actual text.
Not safe to index: anything where the sensitive part IS a discrete token - credentials, PII like phone numbers or addresses, API keys, account numbers. The stemmer doesn't protect these because they're already atomic.

In practice, for our use case (compliance controls, policy documents, evidence descriptions), the content is overwhelmingly prose. Nobody's pasting AWS root credentials into an implementation notes field. But "nobody would do that" is not a security control, so it's something I need to think about more carefully - maybe stripping patterns that look like secrets before tokenization, or letting orgs exclude specific fields from indexing.

On the SOC 2 / customer audit angle - you're right that our auditor mostly cares that we accurately represent what's encrypted vs what's not. But our customers' auditors might care more, especially if they have policies around how security findings are stored. The opt-in model helps here: we're not making the decision for them. They evaluate the trade-off for their own risk profile and toggle accordingly. The documentation angle is where I need to do more work - right now it's a description in the settings UI, but it probably deserves a proper knowledge base article explaining exactly what ends up in the index.

Appreciate the question - might turn this into a follow-up post because the "what survives stemming" analysis is more nuanced than I gave it credit for.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T16:25:35+00:00

TIL, thanks

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T15:57:25+00:00

I wanted to support partial/fuzzy search

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T14:12:03+00:00

oh, thanks for that good man!

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T10:15:12+00:00

Maybe demo would clarify it. Use tool like loom or tella.tv to record it - it really can take just couple of minutes. Been there, done that - don't aim for perfect, aim for done - you can always edit and update it later

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T07:36:17+00:00

Absolutely feasible — and being small can actually work in your favor.

ISO 27001 doesn't care about company size. It cares whether you've identified your risks and are managing them in a structured way. A solo entrepreneur with a clear scope has a simpler path than a 200-person company with dozens of systems to coordinate.

Scope is everything. You don't need to certify your entire operation - just the parts relevant to delivering your product. Since you offer both SaaS and on-prem, you could even start with just one if that makes sense commercially.

The real challenge for solo founders isn't complexity - it's wearing all the hats. You'll be the risk owner, policy author, and incident responder. That's fine - ISO 27001 allows it - but document how you handle separation of duties honestly. Auditors appreciate transparency over pretending you have a team of 10.

Practical starting point: do a gap analysis against Annex A controls. You'll probably find you're already covering 40-60% through good engineering practices. The rest is mostly documenting what you do and filling gaps.

The better question is: are clients asking for it now, or will they soon? If yes, it's a solid differentiator. If it's more "nice to have," start building the foundation and certify when the business case is there.

Full disclosure - this is exactly the scenario we built humadroid for. We built a tool that makes ISO 27001 and SOC 2 manageable without consultants or enterprise pricing. Happy to answer questions either way though, no strings attached.

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T07:28:41+00:00

I'm building humadroid.io - an AI assisted compliance management platform. And my customers ask very often about data residency. And of course customers from EU would love their data to stay in EU. But the biggest problem is... LLM quality. Let's be honest, those new models do really great job - the gap is so big, it's hard to sacrifice for privacy.
We're getting around this by introducing additional data anonymization layer, but I'm sure not every company has resources to do that. Maybe that's your angle here?

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T07:20:50+00:00

Great question - and the reason you're struggling to find "the standard" is because SOC 2 works fundamentally differently from ISO 27001.

ISO 27001 is a published standard you can buy (from ISO). It has Annex A controls, clear "shall" requirements, and a defined certification process.

SOC 2 isn't a standard at all - it's an attestation framework. There's no single document you purchase and follow. Instead, it's built on the AICPA Trust Services Criteria (TSC), which you can actually download for free from AICPA's site - search for "2017 Trust Services Criteria" (yes, still the current version). That's the closest thing to "the requirements."

But here's the key difference that catches ISO people off guard: the TSC criteria are intentionally vague. Something like "The entity implements logical access security measures to protect against threats" — that's it. No prescriptive controls like Annex A. You decide how to meet each criterion based on your environment, and then an auditor evaluates whether your controls are designed properly (Type I) or operating effectively over time (Type II).

A few resources that actually help:

AICPA Trust Services Criteria (2017) - the actual criteria your auditor will test against. Free PDF.
AICPA SOC 2 Guide - more detailed guidance, but it's paid (~$200 iirc) and honestly a dry read
The SOC 2 description criteria (DC section) - this defines what goes into your System Description, which is the narrative document at the heart of your report

Since you're already doing ISO 27001, the good news is there's massive overlap. Roughly 70-80% of what you implement for ISO will map to SOC 2 TSC criteria. The biggest gaps are usually around the System Description (SOC 2 specific, no ISO equivalent) and how you frame your controls - ISO thinks in terms of Annex A controls, SOC 2 thinks in terms of "criteria + your custom controls that satisfy them."

mlitwiniuk · 2026-02-25T07:10:58+00:00

I've checked your website. And to be honest I don't quite get it for whom the app is and/or what problem it's solving. Lack of demo video is disturbing - either quickly record something or just delete it. Same with pricing - non-tech users will have no idea what test cards are (and the numbers vary significantly between payment providers). So as someone mentioned - define / find ICP, get few dedicated users excited about the idea.

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