One piece of advice that fledgling startup founders often hear from successful entrepreneurs is to "do things that don't scale," an idea popularized by Paul Graham of Y Combinator. At first, it might seem confusing to recommend ignoring scalability, since any business process that isn't scalable becomes exponentially more burdensome as the business grows.
But focusing on scalability means deprioritizing the type of "above and beyond" efforts that help catapult startups into solvency — like relationships with a startup's first and most crucial customers. These will usually be won only with dedicated, personalized, and all-hours service that is anything but scalable.
However, there is one area where startups need to scale from the get-go: security. Emerging businesses that do not embrace scalable security do so at their own peril. Thankfully, building scalable security practices requires far less investment and effort than it once did.
Why Startups Need Scalable SecurityStartups are especially attractive targets to hackers due to a combination of limited resources and the proliferation of business models that revolve around collecting customer data. In fact, research shows over 67% of companies with under 1,000 workers have experienced a cyberattack, and 59% were successfully breached.
Investing in scalable security is a startup's best hope at defending against an attack that statistics say it should expect. Lack of scalability in security detracts from efficiency and opens gaps in a startup's networks. It forces IT to preoccupy itself with the endless application of security to new resources and users rather than with optimizing or monitoring. In these cases, companies are ..
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