Evernote’s CTO Addresses Your Biggest Security Worries From 3 to 300 Employees

Enable MFA for every user now and require a hardware security key for admins. This move will carry immediate impact across your notes and projects. liam, Evernote’s CTO, frames it as the right first step for teams from 3 to 300 employees, giving your security a practical baseline.

Scale security with a simple, repeatable playbook. Automate onboarding and offboarding, enforce least privilege, and centralize policy enforcement so you can grow without adding friction. Firms and startups alike benefit from automation; the market rewards teams that move fast without sacrificing safety. unscalable approaches slow you down, and investors want to see governance that scales, liam, Evernote’s CTO, notes.

Core tools include anti-malware with behavior-based detection, integrated endpoint detection and response (EDR), and encryption in transit and at rest. Relying on a single provider for all services is perilous; diversify where you store data and ensure data sovereignty. Regular malware scans, clear incident playbooks, and rapid patching reduce the time you spend cleaning up after an incident. Being able to push updates in hours rather than days keeps your firm able to focus on value, not firefighting.

Practical steps you can implement this quarter include separating admin from user devices, enforcing need-to-know data sharing, and requiring MFA for guests. liam, Evernote’s CTO, also asks you to build a list of high-risk assets, map data flows, and review access monthly. Your investors expect transparency about risk and recovery plans, so publish an incident response document that your support staff and customers can review. Use this as a live checklist rather than a dusty policy.

Measure impact with clear metrics and quick demonstrations. Track incident containment time, malware dwell time, and recovery SLAs. If your team works like netflix in collaboration, automate access revocation and enforce role-based access control to keep the surface area small. Your team is students of security, using practical tools to protect your data, and the goal is to make security a routine capability your business relies on, not a burdensome checkbox.

Practical safeguards for onboarding, access control, and incident readiness

Implement a three-step onboarding policy with unique accounts, MFA, and least-privilege roles plus automatic deprovisioning. If you want to scale security without slowing business, automate provisioning and offboarding to preserve resources and reduce manual handoffs. This approach provides assurance to customers and reduces gaps in access. Recent cases show most incidents were driven by misconfigurations and stale tokens, and it took teams too long to react. Manual approvals slows onboarding.

To sustain this program, mind human factors and cultivate a security culture that emphasizes automation and accountability. Gathered evidence from recent cases shows most incidents stem from gaps in onboarding and access control. We copy templates from livongo and googles IAM templates to stay aligned with proven practices. If you want to act decisively, this approach would reduce potential risk and reassure customers. We would remind product and sales teams that security supports business outcomes rather than slows growth.

• Onboarding and identity management

  • Centralize provisioning via IdP; require unique accounts; enforce MFA; SSO; automatic deprovisioning; maintain an up-to-date access matrix.
  • Documented approval and pass-fail criteria for elevated access; avoid expensive ad-hoc changes and keep an auditable trail.
  • Address resistance by integrating security into developer workflows and product timelines; involve sales to minimize friction during launches of products.
  • Maintain a library of copy-ready policy templates to accelerate onboarding and ensure consistent controls across teams.
  • Ensure offboarding is collected as a formal process to prevent orphaned accounts and preserve resources for the next cycle.

• Access control and monitoring

  • Apply least privilege by default; separate admin accounts; implement break-glass with documented approvals and post-incident review; monitor access events in near real time.
  • Provide time-bound or scope-bound contractor access; automatic revocation at contract end; log all attempts and alert on anomalies.
  • Publish standardized audit trails and feed to a SIEM; conduct quarterly gaps analysis and adjust policies accordingly.
  • Ensure governance across products and businesses to maintain consistent security posture and reduce resistance to changes.

• Incident readiness and response

  • Develop runbooks for common scenarios; include internal and external communications templates to remind stakeholders of roles.
  • Define severity levels and a pass-fail escalation framework; specify containment, eradication, and recovery steps; ensure playbooks are tested.
  • Conduct tabletop exercises quarterly; incorporate recent threat intel; measure time to detect and respond; drive continuous improvement.
  • Adopt a livongo-inspired playbook for automation: signals, alerts, credential revocation, and rapid recovery to reduce dwell time.

Account Provisioning and Deprovisioning: streamline lifecycle for 3–300 staff

Recommendation: implement automated provisioning tied to your identity provider with SCIM, and enforce a 24-hour deprovisioning window to remove access when a role ends. This enables real-time updates, reduces issues, and helps you deal with risk at scale, which matters for everyone involved.

Overview: leverage HR data and policy to start with three staff groups–employees, contractors, interns–and map their access as their roles evolve. Recent events show that even small delays can create exposure, so you want technically sound controls that grow with your giant portfolio of apps. Going forward, you should encrypt data in transit and at rest and sharpen the way you monitor access across the edge of your environment. This mindset makes it easier for they to become compliant and for auditors to review the trail.

• Define three staff groups (staff types) and map access to their role requirements and a kind of minimum privileges across critical systems.
• Use SCIM to automate creation, updates, and removal of accounts across all apps; ensure attributes stay in sync with the HR feed, which reduces drift and accelerates onboarding.
• Link provisioning to HR events and require MFA enrollment before access is granted; this helps deal with credential abuse at the earliest stage.
• Enforce least-privilege through RBAC and ABAC where applicable; align groups to the controls that govern sensitive data and systems.
• Deprovision within 24 hours after termination; automatically revoke tokens, disable sessions, and scrub access across SaaS apps and devices.
• Operate in real-time with event streams and alerts for unusual provisioning patterns or access anomalies; address issues before they compound.
• Schedule regular access reviews: monthly for smaller teams, quarterly for larger ones, focusing on high-risk systems and data they access.
• Maintain an audit trail: record who granted access, when, and on which system; export reports for auditors and compliance checks to satisfy requirements.
• Handle edge cases like contractors, vendors, and acquired entities; apply the same lifecycle rules across every kind of external access.
• Protect assets with encrypt in transit and at rest; enforce per-session encryption and strong authentication across services; build resilience against ddos-related outages at the identity layer with rate limits and failover.

Recent observations show that a disciplined approach scales as teams grow, and startups such as wayve demonstrate how a tight provisioning process pays off quickly. It gives you a clear overview of access, makes it easier to manage their permissions, and helps you mind the risk as you go from a small team to a larger one. By keeping the process technically sound and by sharpening the controls, you afford yourself a lean path to stay compliant while you become a more mature organization.

Authentication: MFA, passkeys, and recovery workflows

Make passkeys the default authentication method for all employees, with MFA required for admin and high-risk access. This approach reduces login fatigue and absolutely strengthens phishing resistance, proving a next-gen identity path that investors can rally around. It grows trust and demonstrates a framework that works beyond passwords under the hood. lets accelerate the rollout, please, across teams, aiming for 85–95% passkey adoption within 60 days. For investors, this communicates a proven, scalable position under leadership that raised the bar for security.

MFA remains required for devices or scenarios where passkeys can’t be used; ensure every admin and critical resource requires a second factor. Use a provider that supports phishing-resistant FIDO2 passkeys and is part of a coordinated framework. This lets you tighten the rollout and measure adoption; monitor progress with clear metrics. Livongo-style programs show how to scale security without adding friction. The goal is to keep effectiveness high while reducing fatigue.

Recovery workflows must be fast and secure: issue recovery codes, require backup verification via a secondary channel, and route through an approved administrator reset path. Theres always risk of social engineering; mitigate with strict identity checks, rate limits, and verification of recent activity. Document and test these steps quarterly to catch gaps and verify they align with the current threat model. Ensure users know how to initiate recovery without exposing sensitive data.

Monitoring and metrics guide growth and accountability: activation rate, recovery requests, failed login attempts, and time-to-restore. A ramp plan for the next 90 days sets milestones, and you can show a clear impact to investors by comparing before/after vectors. The team should publish a weekly scorecard and send summaries to stakeholders, always keeping security in sight and coordinating with the role and provider governance. It worked in pilots and can scale when you align with your framework and governance.

Access Governance: RBAC, groups, and least-privilege at scale

Implement an RBAC model with eight core roles, map each role to a tightly scoped set of permissions, and enforce access by default to nothing beyond those permissions. Create groups that reflect job families–content editors, researchers, data-exports specialists, and operations jobs–and assign members to a primary group with limited exception groups. This provides a robust control layer and keeps the mind focused on risks, ensuring little drift between what someone can do and what their job requires. The policy engine itself enforces these boundaries, and changes are logged as each request to receive access is processed, so later audits can verify who requested what and why. The thing to monitor is any drift in privilege across groups.

Apply least-privilege by granting permissions at the group level, not per user, and implement just-in-time elevation for rare events. Introduce a rotation cadence where membership in sensitive groups is reviewed weekly and changes are tracked in a secure log. Use automated tests to verify that each role contains only the minimal set of assets it needs, and run quarterly tests that simulate real work scenarios in area-specific sandboxes. Run a focused test after each significant change to confirm alignment, which reduces fatigue on the control plane and avoids noise in alerts while keeping ownership clear. However, this requires clear escalation paths so that someone can approve exceptions quickly when a business need arises.

Scale considerations: as teams grow, define the area boundaries for groups and keep the RBAC matrix compact–the best practice is to cap roles at 12-15 and use group nesting sparingly. In large organizations, events such as hiring or an acquisition require a predefined playbook: temporarily add a guest or contractor role with time-bound access, then revoke when the event concludes. Netflix-like patterns for access governance emphasize automated policy decisions and clear ownership; here, someone in security owns the policy, and direct approvals come from the line manager or data-owner. All assets have a status tag and are contained within the secure policy, reducing noise and sign of drift. This structure also helps keep them aligned during rapid changes so that they receive minimal disruption.

Metrics and signals: track access by asset and area, generate monthly reports showing which groups hold permissions, the number of direct access requests, and patterns across jobs. If a user should receive new rights, ensure a sign-off from the manager and verify entitlement with a lightweight test against real use. A robust approach contains thresholds for noise in alerts and uses automated reconciliation to minimize manual work, preventing friction during hiring or audits. In practice, teams can adopt a policy engine that provides a clear line of sight from identity to resource, and it should be able to respond whether a permission is legitimate or not.

Device and Endpoint Security: mobile device management and policy enforcement

Implement a unified mobile device management policy with server-side enforcement on all employee devices. Enroll every device automatically, require strong passcodes and device encryption, and block unapproved apps with a company-wide allowlist to minimize risk from day one. Policies must be enforceable across devices.

Enable automation-first monitoring and alerting to catch noncompliance the moment it occurs. Use conditional access to quarantine space or restrict access for jailbroken or noncompliant devices, and push policy changes remotely across all enrolled devices.

For early-stage teams, implement an automation-first baseline with core controls and a quick-win policy envelope to move fast while staying compliant.

Capture evidence from each event and posture check to support remediation decisions. Sort alerts by risk, assemble a concise evidence timeline, and feed it into security conversations to accelerate response.

Build a robust baseline that scales from 3 to 300 employees: start with a core policy for device configuration, app whitelisting, and data-at-rest protection, then extend to containerization and per-app VPN if needed.

Document policy, workflows, and results in your pitchbook to align leadership and investors; connect issues with remediation steps and update street intel sources in your risk model for certification readiness.

Conversation with the team should be ongoing: share value metrics, demonstrate the advantage of a centralized MDM, and use evidence from monitoring to prove improvements. Absolutely commit to an evidence-based, forward-thinking approach and include Markowitz-inspired risk weighting to prioritize alerts. This forward stance helps balance speed and risk.

Visibility and Response: auditing, alerts, and incident playbooks

Set up a centralized auditing hub that ingests authentication logs, anti-malware signals, access events, and product telemetry, then pair it with automated alerting that notifies the on-call channel within minutes of a policy violation.

Establish baselines for known-good behavior and run assessments every quarter; keep an annual external audit to verify controls, and map former configurations to current control state for continuity.

Build incident playbooks with clear ownership, detection criteria, containment steps, eradication actions, and recovery checklists. Practice them monthly, tell stakeholders the overview of outcomes, and archive former playbooks to inform annual reviews.

Design alerts to balance speed and signal quality: categorize by criticality, attach context (user identity, authentication state, host, anti-malware status), and route to the right on-call window. dont flood teams with noise; shouldnt rely on a single threshold.

Measure what matters: take MTTD and MTTR metrics, alert rate, and the share of alerts driven by known-good behavior. Use a simple dashboard to provide an at-a-glance overview for everyones on the same page.

whether you build early-stage products or scale to enterprise, apply strategies that fit the stage: lightweight automation and runbooks for early-stage, formal risk scoring and annual audits for mature products.

Adopt a defense-first mindset and deploy a decent control plane, ideally a single tool or wayve to unify data sources. Use an astronaut-like discipline for drills, ensure authentication and access controls are enforced, and tell teams how playbooks reduce impact when coming incidents arise.