Business Challenges

Cloud Infrastructure Complexity
The startup’s AWS deployment grew organically, resulting in inconsistent configurations, hardcoded credentials, and overlapping IAM policies.

IAM Permission Mismanagement
Overprivileged IAM roles granted broad administrative rights, including the ability to modify S3 bucket ACLs.

Data Exposure Risks
Several S3 buckets contained sensitive customer data without proper encryption or public access restrictions.

Unsecured APIs
Testing revealed injection-prone endpoints lacking proper validation and rate limiting.

Privacy Risks in Development
Production data was mirrored in dev environments for testing, exposing real user information to internal staff.

The startup’s challenge was balancing rapid innovation with enterprise-grade security, critical for both funding and customer trust.

(Section wrap-up)
The infrastructure worked, but it wasn’t hardened. Security debt had quietly accumulated during rapid growth, threatening the company’s next stage.

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Business Impacts / Key Results Achieved

Zymr helped the SaaS startup transform investor scrutiny into validation. The completed assessment accelerated funding, opened enterprise sales doors, and positioned the company as a trustworthy SaaS provider.

Security went from a compliance checkbox to a core business enabler, proving that maturity and agility can coexist even in high-speed startup environments.

22 vulnerabilities remediated across cloud and app layers.
100% IAM compliance achieved via least-privilege restructuring.
All data storage encrypted; no public S3 exposure.
Secure CI/CD pipelines established.
Investors received a clean third-party security attestation, facilitating successful Series A closure.

Security shifted from an investor concern to a selling point. The company could now scale with confidence, backed by credible cybersecurity foundations.

(Section wrap-up)
The proof was in perception, security became part of the startup’s value story, not a risk footnote.

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