Growth looks impressive. New hires getting started, customers signing on faster than the onboarding team can keep up, and product shipping so quickly that no one wants anything to slow down. But momentum hides problems — and fast-growing companies rarely pause to look beneath the surface at the cracks appearing, specifically security concerns. It’s easier to celebrate speed than examine what that speed is doing to the systems supporting it.
Fast-growth companies rarely break down dramatically; it’s usually the culmination of small things failing at the wrong moment and things building until they can no longer come back from it.
But let’s take a look at the less obvious ways that fast growth can be undone thanks to oversights in security.
In a small startup, security happens through instinct. One team is visible. If something looks off, someone notices immediately. But when growth accelerates, knowledge doesn’t scale as fast as the headcount, and this is where things start to come undone. It might be existing employees cutting corners to avoid blocking progress, or too much access is granted “for one day” and then not revoked, or a developer shares something sensitive to move faster. And before you know it, these rushed decisions are the building blocks to security breaches.
None done in malice, just mistakes from trying to keep up.
If a tool solves a problem right now, someone will adopt it — even if IT hasn’t reviewed it yet. A design plug-in here, a data sync tool there, or a personal cloud folder used temporarily because approvals take too long.
Before you know it, these tools are part of how you work, and checks have slipped under the radar, and one is unaware of what happens to the data or who has access to what it contains.
Shadow IT — the term for the use of unauthorised IT tools doesn’t start with bad intentions. It’s typically because people take shortcuts, official processes take too long, or weren’t in place to handle requests.
And before you know it, it’s now an essential piece of kit, and removing it would cause too much upkeep and expenses. And this is where the problem lies. With no vetting or stringent security in place, data becomes exposed simply because that initial use was overlooked, and that pose security risks.
When growth comes first, structure and security usually come down the line. The team moves quickly, but no one can say who approves what.
This is where governance matters. GRC stands for governance, risk, and compliance — not as a buzzword, but as a framework that prevents security from relying on hope or habit. It forces clarity. It creates proof. It keeps the business out of situations where the first conversation after an incident is “who was supposed to own this?”
Governance isn’t the brake, it’s the steering.
Every fast scaling company depends on partners — cloud providers, managed services, and integrations with other platforms. Each one introduces access points that the internal team doesn’t directly control.
A vendor with weak authentication standards can still access core systems, and all of a sudden, their security failures quickly become a problem. And customers won’t blame them, they’ll blame the logo that they recognize — yours.
Fast growth feels unstoppable until a security incident proves it isn’t. The problems almost never come from deliberate sabotage; they come from small, repeated decisions—access not revoked, tools adopted without review, ownership never clearly assigned, vendors trusted without verification—that accumulate quietly in the background.
These oversights in people, tools, governance, and third-party relationships are the most common ways rapidly scaling companies lose control of their security posture. Left unaddressed, they turn momentum into liability.
The fix is straightforward: treat security as part of the growth process, not a later-phase cleanup. Define ownership early, enforce least-privilege access, review every new tool before it becomes essential, and hold vendors to the same standards you hold yourself.
Companies that build these habits from the start don’t slow down—they become the ones that never have to explain a breach to their customers.
