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Security & Compliance
Pass the security questionnaire. Then pass the audit.
Reyem Tech assesses your security posture and guides you through SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PIPEDA — advisory through full program ownership.
What We Deliver: Security & Compliance That Closes Deals
Practical security work tied to a business outcome — passing the audit, answering the questionnaire, and protecting sensitive data. Not fear-driven tooling sprawl or compliance theatre.
CTO-led security and compliance consulting for startups and SMBs across the US and Canada facing an enterprise security review. We assess your posture and guide SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PIPEDA work. A senior technologist owns delivery end-to-end and translates requirements into changes engineers can ship — without enterprise audit overhead or a full-time CISO. Built for teams of 5 to 200.
How Our Security & Compliance Engagement Works
A structured path from "we don't know where we stand" to a passed audit and a maintained program. Every phase has a decision gate, so you never commit beyond what's working.
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2-3 weeks
Assess
Test exposure against your applicable framework.
Security Posture Assessment: We map your controls, test real exposure, and benchmark against the framework your buyers care about. You get: A written gap report with a prioritized remediation roadmap, not a generic checklist.
Security Questionnaire Support: We triage and answer customer and vendor security questionnaires (CAIQ, SIG, custom) honestly. You get: Completed questionnaires plus a credible remediation plan for any gaps — fast enough to keep the deal alive.
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4-12 weeks
Remediate
Close priority gaps with coached or embedded support.
Vulnerability Management: Prioritize policy, logging, and cloud security fixes alongside continuous scanning, dependency monitoring, and a sane process for triaging and closing findings. You get: A working vuln-management pipeline with SLAs auditors and customers expect.
Secure SDLC: Bake security into how your team ships: code review, secrets management, CI/CD guardrails, and SAST. You get: A documented secure-development lifecycle your developers actually follow.
Identity & Access (IAM): Least-privilege access, SSO, MFA enforcement, and periodic access reviews across your cloud and tools. You get: An access model and review cadence that satisfies SOC 2 and ISO 27001 controls.
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3-6 weeks
Prepare
Collect evidence, check readiness, and manage the auditor.
SOC 2 Readiness: Type I and Type II preparation: policies, controls, evidence, and auditor liaison so the report lands. Evidence collection may use Vanta, Drata, or Secureframe. You get: An audit-ready control set and an evidence trail your auditor will accept.
ISO 27001 Certification: Stand up a right-sized ISMS and run it through certification — without enterprise bureaucracy. You get: A defensible ISMS, risk register, and Statement of Applicability ready for the certification body.
PIPEDA & Privacy: Canadian privacy compliance — PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, and GDPR where you serve EU customers. You get: A privacy policy, consent and access processes, and breach-reporting that hold up under scrutiny.
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ongoing
Certify & Maintain
Reach certification, then keep the program current.
Incident Response: Maintain the program with access reviews, monitoring, and vCISO oversight. A practical incident-response plan and runbooks help your team know what to do at 2 a.m. You get: An IR plan, severity matrix, and runbooks — plus a tabletop exercise to prove they work.
Decision gate:
After the assessment you decide how deep to go — coach your team, have us embed, or hand us the whole program. No multi-year lock-in.
THE DIFFERENCE
CTO-Led Security vs. The Alternatives
Why a big-4 auditor, a DIY scramble, or a full-time CISO are the wrong first move for a team under 200.
| Metric | Reyem Tech (CTO-led / vCISO) | Big-4 / DIY / Full-time CISO |
|---|---|---|
| Time to answer a security questionnaire | Days | Weeks of internal scramble (DIY) |
| Cost to get audit-ready | From $2,000 assessment, then vCISO from $2,750/month | $100K+ (big-4) or $200K+/yr (CISO hire) |
| Who does the work | Senior security + your existing team | Junior consultants, or you, after hours |
| Output | Passed audit + changes your devs can ship | A 200-page report nobody actions (big-4) |
| Ongoing coverage | vCISO retainer, scaled to your stage | Full-time salary + benefits, or nothing (DIY) |
Who This Is For: Teams With Security on the Critical Path
Security and compliance stop being optional the moment they block revenue or put sensitive data at risk. These are the people who call us.
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The Founder Blocked by a Security Review
One signature from closing a major deal, a 200-row questionnaire arrives; get it answered in days, not months.
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The SaaS CEO Who Needs SOC 2 to Sell Up-Market
Meet enterprise SOC 2 requirements before the first sales call to unblock the deals that matter.
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The Ops Leader Handling Sensitive Data
Protect customer health and financial data, meet PIPEDA obligations, and fix access gaps without a security owner.
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The Technical Founder Without a Security Owner
With pentest knowledge but no time to run compliance, assign a senior owner to direct team changes.
Who This Is NOT For
- You need a one-off penetration test only, with no compliance or remediation follow-up (we can refer you)
- You want a compliance badge with no intention of implementing the underlying controls
- You're a large enterprise that needs a dedicated in-house security department, not a fractional model
- You're looking purely for cyber-insurance paperwork with no interest in actually reducing risk
The Reyem Tech ladder
Four buyable rungs. Pick the one that matches where you are. Each step is a real, productized engagement — not a vague consultation.
Technology Health Check
For security, the Health Check is a fast posture screen: automated checks flag your biggest exposure and roughly where you'd stand against a customer security questionnaire. It's the standard $2,000 fixed-scope review of your stack, architecture, team, and risk, with a written report and a 60-minute readout in about two weeks. The formal SOC 2 / ISO 27001 gap assessment, remediation, and certification live in the advisory, hands-on, and execution tiers.
Advisory
Starts with a formal SOC 2 / ISO 27001 gap assessment, then an ongoing vCISO retainer: compliance and security guidance on a monthly basis — policy review, vendor risk decisions, questionnaire answers, auditor liaison, and a sounding board for your team. You drive execution; we keep you audit-ready and out of trouble.
Hands-on management
We embed and own the workstreams that block you: writing policies, configuring IAM and logging, hardening your cloud, standing up vulnerability management, and running the auditor evidence collection — so remediation and audit prep actually get done instead of slipping another quarter.
Full execution
End-to-end ownership of your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 program from kickoff to certification: framework selection, control implementation, evidence automation, auditor management, and the report or certificate in hand. We own the outcome — passing the audit — not just the advice.
Signs You Have a Security Gap
If two or more of these sound familiar, a security posture assessment will save you from learning the hard way — in a failed audit or a breach.
Frequently Asked Questions
A deal stalled on a security questionnaire
Enterprise buyers gate purchasing on security review. If you can't answer their questionnaire credibly, the deal dies quietly.
No one actually owns security
Security is "everyone's job," which means it's nobody's. There's no policy set, no access review, and no plan for when something goes wrong.
Access is over-provisioned
Former contractors still have logins, everyone is an admin, and there's no record of who can reach what. That's an audit failure and a breach waiting to happen.
You handle sensitive data without safeguards
Customer PII, health, or financial data lives in your systems, but you have no documented PIPEDA controls, encryption standard, or breach process.
Logging and monitoring are an afterthought
If you were breached today, you couldn't reconstruct what happened. No centralized logs, no alerting, no evidence trail.
Security lives in someone's head
Your controls aren't written down, so they can't be audited, can't scale, and disappear when that person leaves.
How long does SOC 2 take to achieve?
A SOC 2 Type I report (controls designed correctly at a point in time) typically takes 2–4 months from kickoff. A SOC 2 Type II (controls operating effectively over time) requires an observation window of 3–12 months on top of that — most startups choose a 3- to 6-month window. If you start from zero controls, budget 6–9 months to your first Type II report; with our embedded remediation it moves faster because evidence collection is built in from day one.
SOC 2 vs ISO 27001 — which one do we need?
It depends on who is asking. SOC 2 is an attestation report (not a certificate) driven mainly by North American B2B SaaS buyers — if your enterprise prospects are US or Canadian, they almost always ask for SOC 2. ISO 27001 is an internationally recognised certification preferred by European, UK, and government buyers, and it certifies a full information security management system (ISMS). Many of the underlying controls overlap, so doing one makes the second far cheaper. We help you pick based on your actual sales pipeline, not a checkbox.
What is PIPEDA compliance and does it apply to us?
PIPEDA (the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) is Canada's federal private-sector privacy law. It applies to most Canadian businesses that collect, use, or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activity. Compliance means having a privacy policy, a designated privacy officer, consent and access processes, breach reporting, and safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the data. If you operate in Quebec, Law 25 adds stricter requirements. We assess where you stand and close the gaps without turning it into a legal-firm-sized invoice.
How much does SOC 2 readiness cost in the US and Canada?
Pricing follows our engagement ladder. The $2,000 Technology Health Check (with a security-posture screen) is the entry; advisory / vCISO is from $2,750/month; embedded remediation and audit prep is from $8,000/month; and a full SOC 2 or ISO 27001 program to certification — fractional CTO plus engineers at $50–$100/hour — typically runs $20K–$60K. Two external costs sit on top: the auditor's attestation (typically $15K–$40K) and compliance-automation tooling like Vanta, Drata, or Secureframe (roughly $7K–$25K/year). These are typical averages for planning only — actual cost is assessed per project and scope, and is not a guaranteed price. It is still far below a full-time CISO or a big-4 engagement, and we give you the full picture on the first call.
Do we actually need a vCISO?
If a customer security review is blocking a deal, your prospects are sending you questionnaires, or you are storing sensitive data without a clear owner of security, then yes — but you almost certainly do not need a full-time CISO at $200K+. A virtual CISO (vCISO) on retainer gives you senior security ownership, auditor liaison, and decision-making at a fraction of the cost, scaled to a team of 5–200. Most of our clients start with the assessment, then move to a vCISO retainer only if ongoing oversight is genuinely needed.
A customer sent us a security questionnaire we can't answer — can you help?
Yes, this is one of the most common reasons companies call us. We triage the questionnaire (often a 100–300 row spreadsheet or a CAIQ/SIG), answer what you can honestly answer today, flag the gaps that need real remediation, and build a credible plan for the rest. The goal is to keep the deal alive: enterprise buyers rarely expect perfection, but they do expect honest answers and a roadmap. We can have you back to the prospect in days, not months.
Can we get SOC 2 without hiring a security team?
Yes. Most SMBs achieve SOC 2 with their existing engineering team plus outside guidance and a compliance-automation platform. The work is real — policies, IAM, logging, access reviews, vendor management, vulnerability scanning — but it does not require a dedicated security hire for a team under 200. We either coach your team through it (advisory) or own the workstreams ourselves (hands-on/execution) so the audit passes without you building a security department.
How is CTO-led security different from a traditional cybersecurity firm?
Traditional firms tend to either sell you tooling, run a penetration test and disappear, or deliver a 200-page report no one acts on. CTO-led security means a senior technologist who understands engineering, cloud architecture, and the realities of shipping product owns the work end-to-end — translating compliance requirements into changes your developers can actually implement. The focus is pragmatic: pass the customer security review and the audit, harden what matters, and skip the enterprise theatre.
Keep reading
More from the blog
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Enhancing Business Resilience with IT Security
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Navigating IT Compliance in the Digital Age
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Data Protection Services: Safeguarding Your Business Assets
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Cybersecurity: Protecting the Digital Landscape
$2,000 · ~2 weeks · credited on month 3
Not sure where to start?
Vendor-neutral · priced before we start. A Technology Health Check is a fixed-scope engagement. Two weeks, written report, clear next steps — no open-ended commitment.