What is a Platform Readiness Audit?
A platform audit is a review of your application's security, scalability, and quality. For invested start-ups who need due diligence, or established businesses wishing to assess their systems, a comprehensive third party audit isn't just a nice-to-have — it's a crucial step in safeguarding your investment and ensuring business continuity.
How Ready Is Your Platform?
You've invested time and effort into your product, you've ticked all the boxes your stakeholders wanted. You're ready to launch. But ..
- Do you a clear picture of your platform's risk profile?
- Have you fully addressed all those non-functional requirements and edge cases that ensure a platform is secure and scalable?
- Have you thought enough about all those business continuity scenarios?
- Could aspects of compliance cause hasty rework or retrofitting of additional features now you’re in the later stages of your SLDC?
Most of time at least some of the above have not been fully addressed, and this is why is audit — by someone unfamiliar with your product or application — is so crucial.
Why Consider a Platform Audit?
Before launching (or even if your product is already live) a comprehensive platform audit is valuable for ensuring long-term success. It can give you, and your stakeholders, the piece of mind to fully concentrate on what's important — growing your business.
Here are some reasons why your business should consider engaging in a platform audit:
Investor Assurance
Investors need to know that your platform is robust, secure, and ready for the market. A platform audit provides them with the due diligence they require, giving them confidence in their investment. You'll get independent hard facts to deliver to your primary stakeholders.
Mitigating Risks Before Going Live
You’ve built your product, and you’re ready to launch. But have you considered the risks that could impact your go-live plans? An audit can identify potential weaknesses before they become costly problems, ensuring your platform is stable and secure from day one.
Working with Outsourced Teams
Perhaps you’ve worked with an external development team, or you haven't had full oversight on code quality or adherence to best practices. A platform audit provides an independent review, ensuring the integrity and security of your platform.
Evaluating Non-Functional Requirements
Even if your functional requirements are nailed down, an audit helps ensure that critical non-functional aspects such as performance, scalability, and security are not overlooked.
Transitioning to a Production-Ready System
If your platform is nearing production, an audit helps ensure all systems are ready to handle real-world loads without the risk of having to rebuild foundational elements down the line.
Who Should Consider a Platform Audit?
Any business can benefit, whether you're a startup or a household C-Corp. An expert independent platform audit is relevant to any of the following:
Invested Startups: If you're about to go live, an audit helps you mitigate risks and ensures your product is launch-ready.
Companies with outsourced teams: Get a clear picture of quality and security with an external audit.
Established businesses with developed platforms: Even if your platform is live, independent audits can identify risks and ensure scalability as your user base grows.
Businesses looking for investor or stakeholder assurance: Demonstrate due diligence by conducting a platform audits, and reassure those backing your business.
Our Approach to Platform Audits
We're young at heart technology greybeards — we've seen it all, and we've got receipt backed opinions on best practices. Our approach is simple but thorough, we concentrate on three core areas:
1. Quality
We review the application to ensure it adheres to best practices, is performant, readable, and maintainable. We look at testing coverage, and provide insights into the overall health of your platform.
2. Security
Security is critical. Do you utilise static and dynamic security testing (SAST/DAST) to ensure your platform is OWASP compliant? Our audit includes a thorough review of credential security, data encryption, password policies, and much more to ensure your platform is robust against modern cyber threats.
3. Business Continuity
Reliability and scalability is essential to support business growth. We give you a full appraisal on your platform's metrics, and what you could do to improve. We'll look at how available it is, its performance, and if you have the necessary disaster recovery protocols in place. We focus on redundancy, monitoring, and alert systems to ensure business continuity.
Our audits cover the Application, Services, and Environment aspects of your platform to ensure that all areas are thoroughly assessed and meet industry standards like ISO-9001, ISO-27001, and ISO-22301.
Bottom Line
Whether you're worried about it, or you think your platform is in perfect health, an audit is a small price to pay for peace of mind (yes we do think of ourselves as technology doctors).
Let us help you safeguard your investment with a comprehensive audit.