The 30-Day Enterprise Review Prep: A Prioritized Attack Surface Reduction Checklist That Targets What Enterprise Security Reviewers Actually Flag

Enterprise security reviews fail when automated scans reveal critical vulnerabilities. Your product works well, but a deal stalls because of fixable technical gaps. You can pass these reviews with a structured attack surface reduction enterprise review approach. This 30-day pre-security-review checklist for Software as a Service (SaaS) prioritizes technical fixes over policy documentation.

Disclaimer: Mycroft supports audit readiness through automated evidence collection and continuous monitoring. Our platform does not replace an independent third-party security assessment.

‍

Enterprise security review preparation: what reviewers actually look for

Reviewers prioritize technical evidence over policy documents. Deals stall when findings reveal active vulnerabilities. These ten findings cause enterprise deals to fail, ranked by frequency and mapped based on common enterprise security questionnaire patterns and technical review frameworks:

1. Critical and high-severity CVEs in production — Unpatched Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) signal poor operational hygiene and block most reviews immediately.

2. Missing MFA on admin accounts — Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) blocks 99.9% of account compromises according to  Microsoft security research .

3. Excessive IAM permissions — Identity and Access Management (IAM) misconfigurations enable lateral movement during breaches.

4. Exposed or undocumented APIs — Application Programming Interface (API) endpoints missed internally appear immediately in external scans. Many enterprises  lack full visibility  into their attack surface.

5. Weak secrets management — Hardcoded keys in repositories provide direct production access.

6. Lack of WAF or DDoS protection — Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protections are table stakes.

7. Unencrypted data at rest — Missing encryption fails System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 thresholds.

8. Insufficient logging — Missing audit trails make incident investigation impossible.

9. No incident response plan — Lack of documented processes signals inability to handle breaches.

10. Outdated dependencies — Old libraries with known CVEs demonstrate poor patch management.

System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 is a framework for managing customer data based on five Trust Services Criteria. Understanding  SOC 2 compliance requirements  helps map these findings to frameworks driving enterprise reviews.  Application security monitoring  platforms detect these issues continuously.

‍

The 30-day sprint: improving application security before audit

This four-week attack surface reduction enterprise review checklist prioritizes high-severity fixes before documentation.

‍

Week 1: Critical fixes

Week 1 eliminates the findings most likely to fail reviews immediately.

• Patch all critical and high-severity CVEs in production

• Prioritize CVEs with Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores above 7.0 and public exploit code

• Enforce MFA on 100% of admin accounts (identity providers, cloud consoles, CI/CD)

• Configure MFA using hardware tokens or authenticator apps

• Rotate exposed secrets in repositories, logs, or config files

• Scan version control history using tools to identify leaked credentials

• Generate new credentials and invalidate old keys immediately

Estimated effort: 15-20 engineering hours Responsibility owner: DevOps or Platform Engineering Tooling requirements: GitLeaks, TruffleHog, AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault

‍

Week 2: Access hardening

Week 2 addresses the attack surface reduction enterprise review priorities around access control. This phase shrinks identities and permissions accessing production resources to reduce attack surface before enterprise deal closures.

• Audit IAM policies and remove unused permissions

• Delete roles that have not been used in 90 days

• Remove wildcard permissions from all non-emergency accounts

• Inventory all APIs across development, staging, and production

• Verify authentication enforcement on every API endpoint

• Implement least-privilege across cloud roles and service accounts

• Add rate limiting and API gateway logging

Estimated effort: 20-25 engineering hours Responsibility owner: Security Lead or Cloud Architect Tooling requirements: Cloud IAM Analyzers, API Gateways, AWS IAM Access Analyzer

‍

Week 3: Infrastructure hygiene

Week 3 hardens infrastructure layers that protect applications from external attacks.

• Configure WAF rules for common attack patterns

• Start with Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Core Rule Set as baseline

• Monitor false positives and tune rules to reduce friction

• Verify encryption at rest for databases and object storage

• Confirm backup files and snapshots also encrypt

• Ensure logging captures administrative actions with 90-day retention

• Ship logs to centralized platform for security queries

• Enroll devices in Mobile Device Management (MDM) and enforce disk encryption

Estimated effort: 15-20 engineering hours Responsibility owner: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or Security Lead Tooling requirements: WAF (AWS WAF, Cloudflare), MDM (Jamf, Kandji), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms

‍

Week 4: Documentation and evidence

Week 4 packages technical controls into reviewer-consumable documentation.

• Finalize incident response plan with roles and runbooks

• Assign incident commander, technical lead, and communications owner

• Write step-by-step procedures for containment and recovery

• Update architecture diagrams showing data flows and security controls

• Map customer data from ingestion through processing to storage

• Package security controls documentation aligned with questionnaire categories

• Include screenshots, policy documents, and access logs as evidence

Estimated effort: 10-15 hours Responsibility owner: Security Manager or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Tooling requirements: Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platforms, Lucidchart, incident response templates

 Cloud security scanning  platforms automate vulnerability detection and remediation workflows.  Device management  enforces endpoint policies continuously. Understanding  how long SOC 2 actually takes  helps teams plan beyond the technical sprint.

‍

Why one-time sprints fail and continuous monitoring succeeds

One-time sprints fix immediate gaps but configuration drift resumes immediately. Continuous monitoring detects changes in real time and prevents vulnerabilities from persisting. Quarterly manual reviews miss risks introduced by daily deploys. By the next review, hundreds of changes have accumulated.

 Continuous monitoring  operates 24/7 and flags misconfigurations within minutes. Security teams receive alerts when developers disable encryption or expose new APIs without authentication. Immediate detection enables immediate remediation.

The cost of non-compliance is 2.7 times the cost of maintaining compliance according to  Ponemon Institute research . Failed audits require re-work and delayed revenue. Investing in continuous monitoring prevents these downstream costs.

The integrated approach combines security monitoring, compliance automation, and remediation workflows in one platform. This eliminates manual pre-review sprints entirely. Platforms detect vulnerabilities, create tickets, route findings to engineers, and track closure automatically. Compliance-mapped alerting ties findings to framework controls. When a critical CVE appears, the platform flags the SOC 2 CC7.1 control requiring patch management.

Organizations using this integrated approach maintain continuous audit readiness without fire drills before reviews. Automated evidence collection removes weeks of manual work.  Managed compliance services  deliver this capacity without building security teams from scratch.

Mycroft consolidates security monitoring, compliance automation, and remediation into one platform. The system continuously scans cloud infrastructure, applications, and devices. AI agents collect evidence mapped to SOC 2, ISO 27001, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) controls. Expert-led risk operations teams triage alerts and manage remediations 24/7. This integrated approach eliminates the need for pre-review sprints by maintaining audit-ready posture continuously.

‍

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about resource investment, timelines, and compliance outcomes:

How much engineering time does a typical pre-security-review checklist for SaaS require?

Without prioritization, teams spend over 100 hours scrambling. This sprint structures work across four weeks. Actual time varies based on your starting posture.

Do I need a dedicated security hire to run this sprint?

No. A CTO or lead engineer can execute this checklist. Sustaining the posture manually requires automation or a hire.

Will this checklist make me SOC 2 compliant?

Not by itself. SOC 2 requires broader governance and independent auditing. This checklist solves the technical findings that block deals most often.

What is the most common reason to reduce attack surface before enterprise deal reviews?

Deals fail because automated scans reveal critical CVEs or missing MFA. These signal high risk to buyers and stall contract execution.

How long does it take to transition from reactive sprints to continuous monitoring?

Platform implementation takes two to four weeks including integrations. Teams see immediate value from automated scanning. Full compliance automation matures over 60 to 90 days.

To automate your attack surface monitoring and stay audit-ready,  talk to a Mycroft expert .

‍