This article explores the first of the five foundational pillars every founding team should prioritize: Identity & Access.
This series is for founding teams who want practical, scalable security—guidance that works in the real world, not just in theory. The goal is to help you distinguish:
- What you need to get right early
- What can safely wait
Cybersecurity is ultimately a continuous effort to reduce risk. Throughout this series, we’ll focus on the 20% of actions that mitigate 80% of your exposure—with a clear emphasis on what’s truly non-negotiable.
This article is split into two parts:
- The Founding Team’s Guide: What good Identity & Access Management looks like when you’re starting from scratch. Think of this as the 80/20 rule for early-stage security.
- The Practitioner’s Guide: What a more mature setup looks like as your company scales. Designed for the first security, IT, or engineering lead tasked with building sustainable IAM processes.
The goal is to help you understand why these practices are foundational—and how to implement them with the right level of effort at the right time.
The Founding Team’s Guide: Getting IAM Right From Day One
Before diving into implementation, let’s align on definitions:
- Identity: A person, account, or system that can be authenticated—such as an employee, contractor, or application.
- Access: The level of permissions an identity has—what they can see, modify, or control across your systems and tools.
In the early days, IAM is usually informal. Teams are small, trust is implicit, and everything feels manageable. But this illusion of simplicity doesn’t last. Without structure, IAM becomes a chaotic web of shared accounts, forgotten users, and unmanaged permissions.
Even at the earliest stage, you’re already granting access to dozens of SaaS tools—often without strategy. Decisions made without visibility or process quietly compound, creating friction, risk, and technical debt down the line.
Identify Your Identities
Start by clearly defining who and what has access to your company’s resources. This includes:
- Co-founders
- Employees
- Advisors
- Contractors and freelancers
Create and maintain a simple inventory. For each identity, capture: - Name
- Email (preferably company domain)
- Role or function
- Systems and tools they can access
Use work emails as consistent identifiers. Avoid allowing sign-ups with personal emails, nicknames, or first names alone. These are hard to trace and clean up later. This might sound basic, but this visibility is foundational. Without it, you can’t enforce access policies, revoke credentials cleanly, or trace actions to specific individuals.
Identity Lifecycle
Think of identity management as a lifecycle—not a one-time action. Every identity goes through stages:
- Onboarding: What do they need access to on day one?
- Changes: How do you handle role changes or expanding responsibilities?
- Offboarding: How do you cleanly and quickly remove access when someone leaves?
Having even a basic process for each of these phases reduces risk and saves your future self a lot of manual effort—or worse, unintentional exposure. Don’t rely on memory or Slack messages for revoking access—make it a checklist-driven or automated process.
Authentication – The Keys
Authentication is how you verify an identity during login. The sequence of recommendations here matters:
- Standardize on Single Sign-On (SSO) where possible to centralize login and reduce credential sprawl. This could initially be as simple as only allowing authentication to your SaaS apps through Google Workspace.
- If SSO is not available, ensure you enforce strong passwords and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Passwords tend to eventually leak—MFA is your friend.
- Avoid shared logins. Every user should have their own account. This ensures accountability and traceability across all actions.
Authorization – The Permissions
Authorization determines what an authenticated user is allowed to do.
Follow the Principle of Least Privilege:
- Start with the minimum necessary access. I know giving everyone admin makes life easier for all, but this creates high risk and opens the door for mistakes.
- Grant additional permissions only as needed. Don’t be a gatekeeper—if someone needs access for a legitimate reason, grant it. You don’t want the process to be frustrating.
- Group permissions by roles or teams for scalability. Role-based access control (RBAC) keeps risk contained and makes access reviews easier.
When done right, authorization protects your systems without slowing your team down.
Audit Logs
I won’t blabber—just enable audit logs.
They’re essential for tracing actions, especially during incidents or security reviews. Logs help you answer critical questions like who did what, when, and where—which is impossible without them.
Most tools (e.g. Google Workspace, AWS, GitHub, Notion) offer basic logging—just make sure it’s enabled and retained long enough to be useful.
The Practitioner’s Guide: Scaling IAM as Your Company Grows
As your company grows, IAM must evolve. Whether you’re a solo founder or part of a founding team, your identity security decisions early on will influence how well your systems scale later. What worked at five people won’t scale to fifty. The goal isn’t to throw more tools at the problem—it’s to introduce more structure, automation, and risk-based decision making. Let’s walk through how a more mature IAM setup takes shape.
Assign Clear Ownership
One of the biggest early gaps in IAM maturity is lack of ownership. Identity decisions span HR, engineering, IT, and security—but without a clear lead, gaps form quickly. Someone (even if it’s a single founder or early engineer) needs to own:
- IAM tooling and configurations
- Lifecycle management processes
- Access reviews and audit prep
Having one accountable owner ensures IAM decisions are proactive, not reactive.
Risk-Based Identity Management
Not every identity introduces the same risk. You need to classify identities along a few dimensions:
- Human vs. non-human (e.g. employees vs. service accounts)
- Privilege level (e.g. admin, developer, support)
- Access sensitivity (e.g. internal tooling vs. production systems)
From there, you can assign tiered protections. High-risk identities should: - Use phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2, security keys)
- Have shorter session timeouts
- Trigger alerts on unusual behavior
This is about aligning your controls to actual business risk—not applying the same rules everywhere.
Automate Identity Lifecycle Events
Manual provisioning doesn’t scale. As the org grows:
- Use HR events (hires, role changes, exits) to trigger access changes
- Integrate SCIM or directory sync for provisioning
- Set up Slack or ticketing triggers to kick off offboarding workflows
Fewer manual steps = fewer mistakes.
Service Accounts and Machine Identity Hygiene
IAM maturity includes good credential lifecycle hygiene:
- Secrets should never be hardcoded in code or stored in plaintext
- Rotate tokens and credentials regularly using automation
- Use secret scanning tools (e.g. GitHub secret detection, TruffleHog) to prevent exposure
Each service account should: - Be owned by a real human
- Use short-lived credentials
- Have logs tied back to specific activity
Service accounts shouldn’t be invisible users—they should be governed like humans.
Centralize Logging with a SIEM
As your IAM setup matures, audit logs should be centralized for easier analysis and correlation. Consider:
- Forwarding logs to a lightweight SIEM (e.g. Datadog, Wazuh, or Splunk Light)
- Retaining logs for a minimum of 90 days, ideally longer for high-risk systems
- Setting alerts based on identity patterns (e.g. after-hours admin access)
A SIEM helps connect the dots between authentication, access, and behavior.
Periodic Access Reviews
IAM is also a key component in regulatory compliance. Auditors often require:
- Documented access review cycles
- Records of access change approvals
- Evidence of role-based access consistency
Conduct quarterly access reviews: - Use your identity provider to pull access lists
- Have managers confirm whether each person still needs what they have
- Flag orphaned accounts and over-provisioned users
Automated tools help, but the key is consistency. Every review cycle tightens your access management, reducing risk over time. Even a spreadsheet-based review is better than none.
Embrace Zero Trust Principles
Zero Trust isn’t a product—it’s a strategy. As your IAM practices mature, it’s time to shift from implicit trust to deliberate verification:
- Never trust, always verify: Every identity, device, and session should be authenticated and authorized.
- Validate continuously: Don’t assume access is safe just because it was approved once. Evaluate context in real-time.
- Enforce least privilege dynamically: Apply just-in-time access, limit session durations, and revoke privileges proactively.
- Monitor behavior, not just credentials: Track how identities interact with systems. Abnormal actions should trigger alerts or blocks.
When Zero Trust is done right, it becomes your best defense against insider threats, credential theft, and lateral movement. It turns IAM into an active risk control, not just a gatekeeper.
Measure and Improve
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Mature IAM programs define and track success using metrics like:
- % of users with MFA enabled
- Time to deprovision after offboarding
- Number of privileged accounts with standing access
- Ratio of over-provisioned to right-sized roles
Set IAM KPIs early—even if they’re simple. It signals accountability and helps you prioritize improvements over time.
Final Thoughts
Strong IAM starts with visibility and process. Great IAM evolves into automation, contextual decisions, and guardrails that scale. As your company grows, you need more than passwords and good intentions—you need systems that adapt and protect as fast as your business moves.
Start small:
- Track identities and systems
- Use company emails
- Enforce MFA
- Remove access when someone leaves
Then scale up: - Automate lifecycle management
- Introduce real-time access controls
- Govern service accounts
- Apply Zero Trust principles
Your IAM approach is either quietly reducing your risk—or silently compounding it. Choose the former.