How a Brisbane MedTech SaaS company went from inconsistent policies and ad-hoc incident response to board-level governance, hardened cloud controls and customer security reviews passed with no major findings.
vCISO · ISO 27001-aligned ISMS · AWS guardrails · incident response
A Brisbane-based MedTech startup building a cloud-native SaaS product on AWS. A small, technically strong team with real product momentum, selling into health-sector customers who ask pointed questions about how patient and clinical data is handled. Growing fast, cloud-reliant for everything, and heading towards ISO 27001-aligned assurance because their buyers will eventually demand it.
Like most companies at this stage, security lived in the heads of a few people rather than in documented, repeatable practice — and there was no one whose job it was to own it.
Sector: MedTech SaaS · Location: Brisbane · Stage: early-stage, scaling · Platform: AWS, Microsoft 365 · Engagement: Oct 2024 – ongoing
Policies were inconsistent, incident response was ad hoc, and cloud controls varied from account to account. The board asked for a partner to act as vCISO and operational lead: uplift governance, reduce risk, and meet the security expectations of the customers doing due diligence on them.
We took the vCISO role and built the function around it:
The business gained a security function at exactly the stage where security usually becomes fragmented or reactive.
Transparent prioritisation by business risk, not tool preference. We declined optional scope where the cost outweighed the risk reduction and documented why. Vendor-neutral by design, with cloud-native controls before any third-party tooling and the trade-offs written down rather than buried. Least-privilege access for our own staff, no secondary use of client data, and change approvals logged. Skills transfer through paired delivery and runbooks, so the client’s people run the result — the point is to reduce their future spend on us, not to create it.
Startups and scale-ups usually have capable technical people and strong product momentum, but no one whose job is security: cloud tools with weak governance, admin access managed informally, no operating rhythm, and compliance ambitions without the structure to support them. A vCISO who also runs the operational uplift closes that gap without a full-time hire.
Related: the same company’s AWS landing zone and operations model
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