joetheone
We also never send customer security data to 3rd parties, so your data is not heading off in some API to be processed externally, it all happens entirely in our environment.
Admittedly, we've not done SOC2 or ISO27001 yet (the company is only a few months old), but it's on our roadmap, and we're putting the appropriate controls in place from the get go.
I doubt I'll be able to convince you to trust us in a HN comment, so if you'd like to hear more, please do reach out :)
That is an interesting hypothesis, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what the answer is. There are plenty of existing business where you can pay for outside security consulting help, and they are priced accordingly.
My response is that every business in 2021 should be using software to make their operations more efficient and bring costs down. If a business is not doing that, I'd have concerns about their leadership and vision. We're pricing this as a software product because that is what we intend for it to be. Security Experts are expensive and probably do not want to spend 40 hours a week answering security questions for other companies. NLP allows us to make them more efficient with their time and produce the same quality of answers.
It's totally fair to be skeptical that we can pull that off. I will say though that we are fanatical about NOT making this a business where we hire lots of humans to be reviewers. We'd rather fail than hire an army of low wage workers to do the soul sucking job of reviewing other people's questionnaires all day every day.
I fully admit that we do not have the legal expertise to try and tackle that problem at this point.
I see Stacksi as giving our client's an extra pair of hands on their team to help with this tedious work. We're a jr. team member though, so our work needs to be checked over before being sent :)
My answers go something like this:
1. We handle a company's security documentation the same way companies treat any sensitive info they are storing (credit card data, PII, etc). We store it encrypted at rest and in transit, ensure that only employees who need access to said data have that access, require 2FA on everything, require sufficiently strong passwords, encrypt the hard drives of our laptops, virus scan every file that is uploaded before use, virus scan our servers daily, virus scan our laptops daily, etc, etc. We are not SOC2 compliant today but are heading down that path so that we can provide our customers with the confidence that we can be trusted with their information.
2. We have liability insurance for our own company, but we do not take liability for our answers because every single answer is required to be reviewed by an admin or security team member of our client before it can be exported from Stacksi. If an answer has not been pulled directly from a client's policies, we specifically highlight it and review it with the client to ensure that it is accurate and that they are 100% comfortable with it.
3. I have no idea what an assessor might think of one of their vendors using a company like Stacksi to help handle questionnaires, and I imagine it would vary wildly from person to person. However, I see Stacksi exactly the same as having an extra team member on your infosec team who exclusively handles inbound questionnaires. You (their boss) make sure they are familiar with the policies and procedures of your company, and then you review their work to ensure that it is accurate. Does it really matter whether that person is a full time employee or your company, an infosec contractor who helps out part time, or a service like Stacksi?
The vast majority of answers to questions comes directly from a client's own security policies, which we (admittedly) trust are up to date and accurate. We do our best to ensure that we don't use files that were uploaded more than 6 months ago in our algorithms, but if we're getting bad inputs to the system you're going to get bad outputs. When our reviewers do write something new, we check with the client to make sure it is accurate and again, it needs to be explicitly approved by someone on the client's team who has the rights to review questionnaires.
I don't see how this is any different from a jr. employee at a company answering a questionnaire based on the policies and then asking their boss to review. The jr. employee is definitely not going to go through every system themselves to verify that the policies and documentation are accurate. They are going to assume the policies are good and then double check with a trusted source (their boss on the infosec team), exactly what we are doing.
We understand that right now we're not actually helping companies be more secure, and we've never claimed to be doing that. One of our first priorities moving forward is to develop additional tools to actually validate that what is being said in security policies is what is in place. We're not there yet because we are a small and young company, but we will get there :)
A lot of auditors make it seems like once you have your SOC2 or ISO27001 certification that you'll be free from these forever, but our finding is that it might get you out of 20% of these at best, and for the rest it's basically table stakes.
However, you'll have to forgive us for not posting all of that in a HN comment. I understand that you "wouldn't take anything that you've heard so far as an indication of anything other than buzzword competency" but I assume you also probably wouldn't be conducting such diligence in HN comments.
If you're talking about the NDA process between vendors and assessors, that is a whole different can of worms which we have not really waded into at this point.
In my experience as a startup founder, the easiest way to handle these types of situations is to just read over and sign whatever NDA the bigger company has sent over.
We also have absolutely no requirement for our customers to generate docs with us. Any high quality security documentation will do. If you want to spend the hours required to take something open source and adjust them to your needs, more power to you!
A number of our customers combine our service with loopio or rfp.io and we are perfectly fine with that.
Questionnaires get sent when companies want to do business together that requires sharing sensitive info with each other.
I envy that you have never had to deal with these!
That said, the biggest differentiator that I see is that we use a human in the loop model, while Skypher is a purely software solution.
In other industries, an AI that can answer even 90% of the questions well would be a fantastic result. On a security questionnaire, that's going to lead to more back and forth, more meetings, and more work for the vendor (in this case you). Our reviewers are there to make sure that every question is answered perfectly.
If Skypher solves the problem for you, great!
Our AI is probably not going to touch this as it's very unlikely a good answer in in your documentation, so a real person will take a stab at it and then flag it for review with you. We've seen a number of these BS types of questions and can generally give an answer that will satisfy the client, and we can review it with you to make sure you're happy with it.