The Non-Negotiables Most Startups Skip
- Brainz Magazine
- Sep 4, 2025
- 10 min read
Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Written by Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, helping startup teams master their tech domain. With 25+ years of leadership in software and digital strategy, he blends enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and AI know-how to guide fast-growing companies.
In the fast-moving world of startups, speed often takes priority over everything else. Shipping quickly, iterating fast, and chasing growth feels essential, but too often, security gets left behind. For early-stage companies, overlooking security isn’t just risky, it can be fatal. Cyberattacks don’t discriminate by size, and even a single breach can wipe out trust, funding, and momentum. This article explores why security can’t wait, and the practical steps every startup should take to build a strong, secure foundation from day one.
Why security can’t wait
Speed is the currency of early-stage startups. You move fast, ship scrappy, and iterate constantly, that’s often exactly what the market demands. However, in the rush to deliver, one area consistently gets sidelined, excused, or postponed, security.
It’s not hard to see why. Security often feels like something for “later,” something reserved for bigger companies with compliance obligations, dedicated teams, or board scrutiny. In the earliest days, when you’re just trying to prove your product works, safeguards seem like a tax on momentum. Worse, they can feel like a cost centre, overhead that slows the team down without directly driving growth.
But this is a dangerous false economy.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, the average cost of a data breach for small businesses was $4.4 million. A staggering figure that often spells the end for bootstrapped or pre-seed startups.
That’s not an enterprise problem. That’s a startup killer.
Security doesn’t need to be perfect, sophisticated, or even expensive. But it must be present. Just as you wouldn’t ship code without version control, you shouldn’t launch a product without basic data protection and access controls. These are the kinds of risks that don’t surface in day-to-day operations until they suddenly and irreversibly do.
The remainder of this article examines the non-negotiable security practices that every startup should incorporate into its foundation. Not enterprise-grade but just startup-smart.
Because if you wait until it hurts, it’s already too late.
The false comfort of “we’re too small to matter”
Startups often operate under a comforting illusion, “We’re not big enough to be a target.” The assumption is that hackers, scammers, and other malicious actors primarily target Fortune 500 companies or high-profile platforms. However, in today’s threat landscape, small teams are often the most vulnerable and easiest targets.
Cybercriminals don’t need your brand to be famous. They scan the internet for misconfigured services, unsecured APIs, and GitHub repositories with leaked API keys. They use automated tools to probe thousands of small apps for vulnerabilities, then exploit those that lack basic protections. For attackers, it’s not personal, it’s just efficient.
As Andrew Bartlam told us in his recent article, many early-stage startups fall victim to credential stuffing attacks, where stolen passwords from unrelated breaches are reused to gain unauthorised access to unprotected admin panels. Others suffer from ransomware attacks that lock them out of their own systems, often because they didn’t have off-site backups or multifactor authentication in place. Even a simple .env file accidentally committed to a public repo can be enough to compromise your entire infrastructure.
These aren’t hypothetical risks. They happen quietly to small SaaS apps and early products, often before they’ve even found product-market fit. And when they do, the consequences aren’t just reputational. A breach or data loss can mean:
Regulatory exposure, especially under GDPR or CCPA.
Financial losses from downtime, legal costs, and incident response.
Operational chaos, as small teams scramble to understand and fix what went wrong.
In many cases, a single avoidable incident can halt momentum, shake investor confidence, and permanently damage user trust.
The truth is that size doesn’t protect you, it exposes you.
Security by design is not expensive
When founders think of “security,” they often imagine high-end enterprise-grade systems, penetration testing, bug bounty programs, threat modelling frameworks, or full-time security engineers. That might be where you end up, but it’s not where you need to start.
Security by design doesn’t mean protecting against zero-day exploits or deploying a red team. It means baking in secure defaults, things like hashed passwords, access control, encrypted secrets, and audit logs from the beginning, while they’re still easy to add. These aren’t sophisticated protections. They’re basic hygiene, like brushing your teeth.
You wouldn’t wear a seatbelt only when you expect a crash. You wear one because you don’t know when the crash might happen. The time to secure your app is before your first user uploads their data, not after a breach or investor due diligence check.
This idea, the minimum secure baseline, is about implementing lightweight, high-impact protections that don’t require a whole security team. According to OWASP (2024),
This includes:
Avoiding known-vulnerable dependencies
Protecting sensitive data in transit and at rest
Applying the principle of least privilege
Secure authentication with MFA or identity providers
Most of these measures are either free or already available through your frameworks, cloud providers, or CI/CD tools. (Puzas, 2024) Gartner predicts that by 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be attributed to customer misconfiguration or human error, rather than infrastructure flaws.
That means the risks aren’t invisible, they’re just ignored.
If you design your product with a secure baseline, you’ll avoid the most common pitfalls that compromise startups. You’ll also avoid expensive rewrites, last-minute compliance fire drills, and damage to trust that no amount of engineering can undo.
Security doesn’t have to be complex. It just must be intentional.
The secure startup baseline: What you must get right
Security isn’t one big decision, it’s dozens of small defaults. This section breaks down the non-negotiable areas every startup must address to avoid becoming an easy target or a future liability.
Think of these as your secure-by-default checklist, they don’t require a security team or deep information security (infosec) knowledge, just the discipline to avoid common pitfalls.
Identity and access management (IAM)
Startups often overlook IAM because it feels like unnecessary overhead. However, improperly scoped access is one of the fastest ways to leak user data, access production environments, or even gain admin control.
Start by offloading authentication to trusted identity providers. Services like Google, GitHub, Okta, or Auth0 handle OAuth, MFA, password resets, and session management with hardened security and global uptime. Unless your product is an auth provider, don’t build your own login system.
Second, enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all admin-facing tools, not just production systems, but also analytics dashboards, no-code backends, and cloud consoles.
Finally, define simple roles. Even just “admin” vs. “user” helps prevent accidental overexposure. As you grow, tools like AWS IAM or Firebase rules can extend these patterns with fine-grained control, allowing for more precise management.
Default access should always be “deny” unless explicitly required, not the other way around.
Data protection
If your product stores data, it’s your job to protect it, no exceptions. That starts with proper password handling, use a strong one-way hashing algorithm (e.g., bcrypt or Argon2), with a unique salt per user. Never store raw passwords. Never.
Next, treat environment variables as the gatekeepers of your secrets. API keys, DB credentials, and tokens must live outside of your codebase. Tools like .env files (locally) or managed config services (in production) make this easy.
Finally, resist the urge to collect unnecessary PII. If you don’t need birth dates or phone numbers yet, don’t ask for them. The best way to protect sensitive data is not to store it at all.
A lean MVP doesn’t mean sloppy with data, it means minimal and defensible.
Secrets and API keys
API keys and credentials are like keys to your house. If they leak, you’re exposed. Leaked keys are a top cause of cloud account takeovers, especially for startups.
Use managed secrets storage, even in early stages. AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, Doppler, and even Vercel’s secret store offer simple, encrypted, auditable options.
Never hardcode secrets in your source files. Never commit .env files to Git. Use .gitignore, set up repo protection rules, and educate your team on best practices.
Set expirations and rotation policies, even manually at first. Regularly rotate database passwords, access tokens, and third-party keys to maintain security. You’ll thank yourself when revoking access during offboarding or partner changes.
Don’t just “protect” secrets, assume they’ll leak eventually, and plan for containment.
Minimal permissions
The principle of least privilege is simple, no one (and no system) should have more access than they need.
Early-stage teams often grant admin roles to everyone for speed. But cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure all support granular IAM roles that can prevent accidents and contain breaches.
Limit CI/CD pipelines to deploy-only roles.
Don’t let dev environments touch production data.
Avoid root or global admin accounts in all tools.
Even if you’re a team of two, set up separate access paths and document them, future you or your next hire will be glad these policies already exist.
Security starts to fail when everyone has “god mode.”
Dependency hygiene
Modern apps rely on dozens of third-party packages. But every dependency you install is code you didn’t write and might not trust.
Fortunately, most ecosystems now offer built-in vulnerability scanning:
npm audit for Node.js
pip-audit for Python
bundler-audit for Ruby
cargo audit for Rust
Add these to your local dev scripts or CI pipelines. Enable tools like GitHub Dependabot, which scans for vulnerabilities and automatically suggests patch PRs.
Make patching a weekly habit. Updating dependencies may sound boring, but outdated, unpatched libraries are responsible for some of the web’s most significant breaches, from Equifax to Log4Shell.
The fewer dependencies you have, and the more up-to-date they are, the safer your surface area.
Security logging
You can’t fix what you can’t see. Without logging, incidents go unnoticed, sometimes for months. Even a basic logging setup can make the difference between catching a bug and explaining a breach.
At a minimum, log:
Login attempts (success and failure)
Admin actions (updates, deletes, permission changes)
System errors and crashes
Tools like Logtail, Papertrail, or Datadog offer free or low-cost logging with decent dashboards. Even writing structured logs to S3 is better than nothing.
Use these logs not only for debugging, but also for auditing and incident response. When something goes wrong (and it inevitably will), you need to trace what happened, when it occurred, and why.
Logging isn’t optional. It’s your only window into system behaviour during a crisis.
Founders and developers: Who owns security?
At big companies, security is someone else’s job, the domain of CISOs, compliance officers, or enterprise IT teams. But at a startup, there’s no one else.
Founders can’t afford to see security as “technical detail” or a future hire’s responsibility. Today, security is a board-level issue. Investors now inquire about data protection, breach history, and compliance readiness as early as the seed or Series A stage. If you’re building something users trust, especially with payments, messaging, health, or legal data, then trust and security are the same thing.
But it’s not just on founders.
Developers need to treat security the same way they treat performance or reliability, as part of the definition of “done.” Writing tests, catching errors, and patching known vulnerabilities should be part of the regular rhythm, not an exception. Tools like npm audit or GitHub secret scanning help, but it takes culture, not just tooling, to make security a habit.
One proven strategy is appointing a Security Champion. This is not a formal CISO role. It’s simply someone who:
Stays current on common risks (e.g., OWASP Top 10)
Maintains a shared checklist of known gaps
Reviews key features or infra changes with a security lens
Flags issues early, not after an incident
Even in a two-person startup, having “you handle frontend, I’ll own backend and security” is better than ignoring it altogether.
And while startups rarely need a full audit, it’s smart to invite informal reviews:
Ask your technical advisor or mentor to double-check your architecture
Use open checklists (e.g., OWASP ASVS, or Mozilla’s Observatory)
Do a self-review after each major release, “What new risks did we add?”
Ownership doesn’t mean perfection, it means someone cares enough to ask the right questions and improve over time.
Startups that survive and scale are not the ones that avoid every risk, but the ones that take responsibility for the ones that matter.
The actual cost of ignoring security
Security lapses don’t just trigger regulatory fines, they inflict deeper, more enduring damage that can be fatal for startups.
Lost user trust
Even minor breaches can erode customer confidence. Harm isn’t only immediate, reputational fallout lasts. As explained in this article, SMBs often incur approximately $1.52 million in lost business following a data breach, due to churn and reluctance to re-engage after the incident.
Lost B2B deals due to due diligence failures
Enterprise clients, partners, and investors now evaluate a company's cybersecurity posture as part of their vetting process. Failing to present a defensible security framework can block partnership or acquisition opportunities before they arise.
Despite common belief, startups can and often do be acquisition-ready before they’re perfect. Cybersecurity due diligence is central in M&A, as it:
Helps acquirers understand risk profiles
Enhances business valuation
Reduces post-acquisition firefighting
In fact, organisations that demonstrate strong cybersecurity practices are better positioned to sustain deal momentum and preserve value.
Slowdowns from security retrofits
Far from a one-off expense, post-incident remediation drags founders away from product and growth work. Fixing issues under pressure consumes limited bandwidth, delays roadmaps, and distracts strategic focus.
Getting started: Lightweight security practices
10 practical steps any startup can take this week.
Use GitHub/GitLab branch protection.
Enable 2FA on all accounts.
Install dependency audit bots.
Use HTTPS everywhere.
Basic threat modelling for your top 3 flows.
Deploy backups for prod DB.
Create an incident response Google Doc.
Rotate secrets once.
Write and pin a short internal “Security Principles” note.
Book a 1-hour security consultation (even an informal one).
Read more from Alberto Zuin
Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a fractional CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, Master of Your (Tech) Domain. With over 25 years of experience in tech leadership, he helps startups and scaleups align their technology with business strategy. His background spans enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, AI, and agile delivery. Alberto holds an MBA in Technology Management and several top-tier certifications, including CGEIT and CISM. Passionate about mentoring founders, he focuses on helping teams build secure, scalable, and purpose-driven digital products.
References:
Bartlam, A. (2025). Companies must get their cybersecurity in hand, intruders may be watching.
Das, A. (2025). Invisible threats: why cybersecurity due diligence is nonnegotiable in M&A.
Gravel, N. C. (2024). The hidden costs of a data breach for small and medium-size businesses.
IBM Security. (2025). Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025.
Mozilla Foundation (2025). HTTP Observatory.
OWSAP Foundation (2024 A). OWASP Secure by Design Framework.
OWSAP Foundation (2024 B). OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS).
Puzas, D. (2024). 12 cloud security issues: risks, threats, and challenges.
