STARTUP SECURITY: RATIOS AND A 24-MONTH HIRING PLAN

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

The author recommends a 1:40 security-to-employee ratio and 1:100 IT-to-employee ratio for startups, based on research from successful companies like GitHub and GitLab. He advocates for organizing security teams into four distinct areas: IT (employee enablement), Security Operations (infrastructure and compliance), GRC (governance and customer-facing security), and Product Security (application security and engineering). The document includes a detailed 24-month hiring plan that scales from 5 security staff at 187 employees to 16 security staff at 600 employees, emphasizing that proper staffing ratios are essential for moving from reactive to proactive security postures.