Essential Security Practices for Early-Stage Startups
Why Security Matters from Day One
Neglecting security, even at the earliest stage of a startup, is a dangerous and costly mistake. You don’t need to solve every security issue, but you should focus on the security practices with the highest return for the lowest cost.
Implementing security fundamentals early isn’t just about protection—it’s about building a strong technical foundation that will support your company’s growth.
We’ve assembled a quick checklist of security practices, from the easiest to the hardest. The goal isn’t to check off every item on this list, but if you can’t check it off it should still be something to think about and plan for in the future.
The Quick Wins
These are all “must have” items. Every startup should implement these measures from day one.
Enforce Two-Factor Authentication
Require 2FA for all employees across all company systems. Configure your Google Workspace to make 2FA mandatory. This one simple change eliminates numerous potential attack vectors with minimal effort and user friction.
Resources:
Provide a Password Manager
The most effective way to improve password security across your organization is ensuring everyone uses a proper password manager. While browsers offer free password management, these solutions don’t address the occasional need to share credentials securely among team members. Invest in a dedicated password management solution that makes security convenient. Whether you like it not, your employees will be sharing passwords, at least have them do it in an audit-able and secure way.
Resources:
- 1Password - Closed source, but the classic password manager
- Bitwarden - Open-source password manager with team sharing capabilities
- KeePass - Offline, customizable password manager ideal for small teams
- Passbolt - Open-source password manager for teams with collaboration features
Enable Comprehensive Logging
With modern cloud computing environments, enabling logging should be straightforward. Lookup your vendor docs and activate the appropriate logging features. You don’t need sophisticated log analysis tools initially—what matters is having the data available when you need it. This becomes critical if you ever need to investigate a security incident.
Resources:
- OpenTelemetry - The standard to adopt if you’re starting out today
- HyperDX - OpenTelemetry log host (and 1984 portfolio company)
- HoneyComb - Alternative OpenTelemetry log host
The Next Level
Audit Your Secrets Management
Analyze how you distribute secrets (API keys, credentials) to engineers during on-boarding. Early-stage startups often share production keys widely—this creates significant security risks. Any production keys shared with developers should be considered compromised and rotated immediately.
Implement Proper Secrets Sharing
Sending environment variables via Slack or email isn’t sustainable and inevitably gets out of sync. While this remains a challenging problem, there are plenty of tools that can help out. Implement this early before it gets out of hand.
Resources:
- Infisical - Open-source secrets management platform with integrations across infrastructure tools
- Dotenv Vault - From the creator of Dotenv, allows sharing of .env files between team members
The Most Challenging Issues
Treat PII as Radioactive
The best approach to personal identifiable information (PII) is to store as little as possible. Services like Stripe and Authy help keep sensitive data at arm’s length, but you’ll inevitably need to handle some PII—even email addresses qualify as PII under GDPR and CCPA.
Carefully examine every location where PII is stored: Who has access? How is it protected? What could expose it? You won’t be able to completely rid yourself of PII, but do yourself a favor and avoid the hoarder “it might be useful later” mentality. 10 or 15 years ago data was viewed as an asset (“Even if our business model doesn’t work, we can sell the data”), but these days it’s just a liability.
Control Production Access
Production access—while a favorite debugging tool for early engineering team—creates significant security risks. This doesn’t mean limiting access to production logs and traces, which are crucial for resolving outages.
Separate Production and Development Data
Finding bugs that only appear with production data is frustrating, but distributing real production data creates two significant problems:
- You really don’t want your production data being passed around on laptops that leave the office.
- It’s volume of it will eventually eclipse your ability to pass it around easily.
The right solution is creating test fixtures that reproduce data edge cases. This approach also simplifies on-boarding by providing consistent test data for new developers.
Building a Security Mindset
This isn’t an exhaustive security checklist, but rather a starting point for security conversations in your organization. The most successful startups build security into their technical DNA from the beginning—not as a checkbox for compliance, but as a foundational element of their engineering culture.