The "Now What?" Guide:

Your Compliance Foundation Roadmap

Because There's a Smarter Way to Do Compliance.

You’ve launched your business—an incredible achievement. Now, the question becomes: how do you build a strong operational and compliance foundation that enables growth instead of hindering it?

This guide outlines the foundational compliance work we do with our clients. It's designed to protect your new venture and build the trust you need to win customers and secure investment.

Part 1: Your Public-Facing Presence

1. Post a Website Privacy Policy

  • Why This Matters: This is a legal requirement and a critical trust signal for your customers. A generic template can create significant risk if it doesn't accurately reflect how you handle data.

  • How We Help: Aetos drafts a custom privacy policy that is tailored to your specific business and data collection practices, ensuring you are both compliant and transparent.

2. Implement Website Terms of Service

  • Why This Matters: This document is your contract with your website visitors. It sets the rules of engagement, limits your liability, and outlines how your service can be used.

  • How We Help: We craft clear, professional Terms of Service that protect your business interests while being fair and understandable to your users.

3. Set Up a Compliant Cookie Banner

  • Why This Matters: Privacy laws require you to get a user's consent before you place non-essential tracking cookies on their device. An improper banner is a common and easily avoidable compliance failure.

  • How We Help: We guide you in selecting and configuring a consent management platform that meets regulatory requirements and aligns with your marketing goals.

Part 2: Your Internal Governance

4. Create a Basic Information Security Policy (ISP)

  • Why This Matters: An ISP is the central document that outlines your company's commitment to security. It's often the first thing a potential enterprise customer will ask to see during a sales cycle.

  • How We Help: We create a right-sized, practical Information Security Policy that accurately reflects your practices and meets the expectations of your most important stakeholders.

5. Establish a Generative AI Usage Policy

  • Why This Matters: Your team is already using public AI tools. A simple policy is essential to prevent confidential company or client data from being entered into these models, creating massive risk.

  • How We Help: We draft a clear, easy-to-understand AI usage policy that provides your team with safe guidelines for leveraging these powerful new tools.

6. Draft a Basic Incident Response Plan

  • Why This Matters: When a security incident happens, having a plan ready saves precious time, reduces panic, and demonstrates maturity to your customers and investors.

  • How We Help: We build a straightforward, actionable incident response plan so your team knows exactly who to call and what to do in the first critical hours of a crisis.

Part 3: Your Operational Processes

7. Develop a Simple Vendor Vetting Process

  • Why This Matters: Every new piece of software you use is a potential security risk. You need a consistent process for evaluating the security of your vendors.

  • How We Help: We build a simple yet effective vendor risk management program that allows your team to move quickly while still making safe, defensible decisions.

8. Ensure Key Contracts Include Compliance Language

  • Why This Matters: Your employee offer letters and contractor agreements must contain critical language regarding confidentiality and ownership of intellectual property to be enforceable.

  • How We Help: We provide best-practice clauses and work with your legal counsel to ensure your HR and operational contracts are robust and scalable.

9. Develop a Secure Employee Onboarding/Offboarding Checklist

  • Why This Matters: Improperly removing a former employee's access to systems is one of the most common security gaps. A formal checklist ensures nothing is missed.

  • How We Help: We create a formal checklist to streamline your process, ensuring access is granted correctly and, more importantly, revoked completely upon departure.

10. Conduct a High-Level Data Map

  • Why This Matters: You can't protect what you don't know you have. A simple data map helps you understand what personal data you're collecting, where it's stored, and why you have it.

  • How We Help: We guide you through a practical data mapping exercise that gives you a clear view of your data landscape, forming the basis of your entire privacy program.

Ready to Build Your Foundation the Right Way?

Navigating these steps can feel complex, but you don't have to do it alone. This is what we do. Our Compliance Snapshot is the perfect next step to get an expert review of where you stand and a clear, actionable roadmap for the future.

Have questions? Schedule 15 minutes with one of our partners to discuss your specific business needs.