SOC 2 & ISO 27001
for Small Teams
Enterprise buyers want enterprise certifications — but you're not an enterprise. Humadroid is built for teams under 20 where one person part-time owns compliance and the rest of the company keeps shipping.
- You're a team of 3–20 people
- Nobody has 'compliance' in their title — and you're not adding it
- You've got real customers asking real security questions
- You want to pass the audit without rebuilding how you work
Why compliance hits differently for you
Tools built for companies 10x your size
Most compliance platforms assume roles, committees, and review cycles you don't have. You need a tool that works when one person is the security, legal, and IT team.
No room for bureaucracy theater
Policies nobody reads, processes nobody follows, and evidence nobody can find at audit time — that's the small-team failure mode. Compliance has to match reality or it collapses.
One audit shouldn't burn a quarter
You can't afford to have the whole team distracted by an audit. Prep has to happen in the background, not in all-hands.
How a team of 8 satisfies segregation of duties without having 8 roles
SOC 2 and ISO 27001 both expect some form of segregation of duties — the person who makes a change isn't the same person who approves it. With 8 people, literal role separation is impossible. Here's the practical workflow auditors actually accept, and how it lives in Humadroid.
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1Document the principle honestly: you're a small team, full role separation isn't feasible, and you use compensating controls. This isn't a loophole — it's how auditors expect small organizations to operate. Humadroid's policy templates already say this.
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2Define the compensating controls: mandatory peer review on all production-affecting pull requests (enforced in GitHub branch protection), dual-approval on production infrastructure changes (IaC merge + deploy approval), and logging of all privileged actions with quarterly review.
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3Map each compensating control to the relevant framework requirement — CC6.3 and CC8.1 for SOC 2, A.5.15 and A.5.16 for ISO 27001. Humadroid does the mapping so the audit trail is explicit.
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4Automate the evidence: GitHub branch protection settings, PR merge history, deployment approvals, privileged-access logs. All of this is already happening; Humadroid just collects it on a schedule.
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5During the audit, instead of hand-waving about a small team, you point to: a documented policy acknowledging team size, specific compensating controls, and continuous evidence they're enforced. That's a clean finding.
SOC 2 and ISO 27001, shaped to your reality
Same platform, two frameworks. Pick one, start with both, or switch later.
SOC 2
The report US buyers ask for.
- Scoped to what you actually run — nothing inherited from a 500-person template
- One-person-ownable workflow with clear next actions
- Automated evidence so audit week isn't a fire drill
- Auditors we've worked with who understand small teams
ISO 27001
The certificate European and enterprise buyers want.
- ISMS that fits on a small team's actual practices
- Risk register you'll genuinely update, not one that dies in a spreadsheet
- Realistic roadmap to certification and surveillance audits
- Controls proportionate to your size — not theatre
What the first 60 days actually look like
Not a marketing timeline — the real sequence we see for teams like yours.
Name an owner and define scope
One person owns the program (usually a founder or senior engineer). Scope is typically production environment only. That's the entire first-week decision — and it's the decision most small teams delay for months.
Inventory and policies that match reality
Asset and vendor inventory. Policies generated from your real stack, then trimmed to what you actually do. Every policy statement that doesn't match reality is deleted — compliance-theater policies are worse than none.
Compensating controls where role separation isn't possible
Document how peer review, dual approval, and logging stand in for the separation a 500-person org would have. Auditors expect this from small teams.
Evidence automation and training
Connect cloud and source control. Run the team through role-appropriate training (30–60 min each, tracked). Risk assessment against your inventory.
Audit-ready with proportional controls
Walkthrough with an auditor who's done small-team audits. The conversation is about what you actually do, not a theoretical enterprise environment.
How Humadroid handles it
One-owner workflow
The platform's task list, reminders, and next-actions are built so one person — part-time — can drive the program end to end without blocking engineering.
Learn more →Continuous evidence collection
The single biggest time-saver for small teams. Evidence flows from AWS, GCP, GitHub, Cloudflare on a schedule so audit prep is review, not creation.
Learn more →Assessment library kills questionnaire fatigue
Small teams get asked the same questions by every enterprise prospect. Answer once, reuse forever. This is the single highest-leverage feature for small teams selling up-market.
Learn more →Training sized for small teams
Role-appropriate security training in 30–60 minutes per person per year, tracked automatically. No mandatory two-hour modules on topics irrelevant to an 8-person team.
Learn more →Proportional vendor management
Small teams have 10–30 vendors, not 300. The workflow reflects that — quick assessments for low-risk vendors, real depth for the few that matter.
Learn more →AI assistant as compliance buddy
For judgment calls that would otherwise need a consultant — 'do we need a DPO given our size?', 'is quarterly access review enough?' — the assistant answers using your specific context.
Learn more →What auditors actually ask teams like yours
Real questions we've seen in SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits for your cohort — and what a good answer looks like.
How do you handle segregation of duties given your team size?
Auditor isn't trying to trap you — they want to see you've thought about it. Good answer: named compensating controls (peer review, dual approval, logging), each documented and enforced. Bad answer: 'we trust each other'.
How do you keep the program running when someone is on vacation or leaves?
Small-team continuity question. Expect to cover: documentation in the platform (not in one person's head), backup approvers for critical actions, offboarding checklist. The point is that the program survives personnel changes.
Show me your last quarterly access review.
For small teams this is often the weakest point because it's easy to forget. A platform that schedules it, runs it against live IAM, and logs decisions is usually the difference between a clean finding and an exception.
What's the smallest incident you logged in the last 12 months?
Auditor is checking your bar for 'incident' isn't set so high that you never log anything. A near-miss, a minor outage, a botched deployment — all reasonable incidents for a small team. 'We've never had one' is a yellow flag.
Questions we hear a lot
What's the smallest team that can realistically get SOC 2 or ISO 27001? +
We've seen teams of 3–5 people pass audits with Humadroid. Below that, the bigger question is whether certification actually unblocks revenue. If enterprise buyers are asking, you're ready to start.
Don't frameworks require segregation of duties we can't have? +
They require documented, proportionate controls — not a specific team size. Small teams compensate with compensating controls: peer review, dual approvals on sensitive actions, logging. Humadroid's templates already reflect this.
How many hours per week will this really take? +
During prep: 4–10 hours/week for one person, for 6–8 weeks. Ongoing: 2–4 hours/week to keep evidence flowing, update the risk register, and handle questionnaires. Much less than most teams expect.
What if our one compliance owner leaves? +
Everything lives in Humadroid — policies, evidence, risk register, audit trail. A new owner inherits a working system, not tribal knowledge. This is a much smaller failure mode than a consultant-led setup.
Can we do SOC 2 and ISO 27001 at the same time? +
Yes, and it's usually more efficient than sequential. The two frameworks overlap substantially — Humadroid maps controls across both so you prepare evidence once and apply it twice.
What about ongoing maintenance and re-audits? +
SOC 2 is annual. ISO 27001 is a three-year cycle with annual surveillance audits. Humadroid's continuous evidence collection means re-audits are reruns of a working process, not fresh fires.
Ready to stop postponing this?
Get SOC 2 or ISO 27001 on your terms — without a consultant, without a full-time compliance hire, without the dread.