How Shellkode Cut ISO 27001 Audit Prep from 30 Days to 14 Hours with Sprinto
Shellkode is a cloud consulting and engineering firm working in a cloud-only operating environment. Its clients include regulated companies. Shellkode is also a premium AWS partner and a key player in the Generative AI services segment in India.
– Bhuvanesh R
CTO, Shellkode
– Bhuvanesh R
CTO, Shellkode
Introduction
The need for ISO 27001 arose when Shellkode began fielding regulated companies that wanted a cloud audit before they would engage. Provable security also underpinned the growth plan, both for expanding into new geographies and for building guardrails around a rising headcount.
Shellkode first engaged an ISO auditor from the founders’ professional network. The auditor’s opening document ran to around 400 questions covering everything from the nature of risk assessment to the status of various controls, and the founding team, new to compliance, felt like it had hit a wall.
The Problem
“We’re a busy team; the founding team especially travels a lot for client meetings. With all these constraints, we were told we’d need at least three months to prepare for our ISO 27001 audit. But we wanted an accelerated way to do compliance,” says Bhuvanesh R, CTO at Shellkode.
A Sprinto partner ran the team through a short self-assessment quiz to estimate readiness for ISO 27001 and SOC 2. Shellkode scored 94%, which left a narrow band of fine-tuning between the company and both standards.
Shellkode set about closing that 6% gap.
A live demo followed. The demo showed the team how Sprinto could structure compliance and automate evidence collection. “We were impressed with how Sprinto served as a source of truth by structuring compliance and automating evidence collection. At first, we couldn’t believe that a platform could do all this!” says Bhuvanesh.
The Solution
Healthy cloud configurations and closed security gaps meant Shellkode could hit the ground running, and the team worked through three brief phases. “Sprinto gives us real-time feedback on the security and compliance posture of our cloud assets, systems, and processes. This level of transparency and accountability is a major win,” says Bhuvanesh.
“In terms of integrations, automation, and tracking, we’ve never seen anything like this!” says Bhuvanesh.
In the first phase Shellkode brought its assets onto Sprinto for control mapping and monitoring, helped by native support for every cloud system it used. The team formalized Disaster Recovery and Incident Management policies from Sprinto’s built-in templates, then ran policy acknowledgments through control-linked policy campaigns, which produced clear audit logs.
Security training was completed in a day, with the team split into four groups working through the in-built modules over group calls.
The second phase put progress on the dashboard. Sprinto’s parent-child information architecture produced a real-time picture of control status, owners, and pending tasks, and always-on tracking is what let the team catch drift before it turned into delay.
The third phase automated over 95% of control tracking, validation, and evidence collection through asset-mapped integrations. In its cloud-only environment, Shellkode used the integrations to automate control tracking and collect time-stamped, auditor-grade evidence with each passing check. When a check failed, context-rich, time-bound notifications went to the control owner, which created accountability and prompted remediation on time.
That cut infosec effort for audit prep from the suggested 30 days to a little over 14 hours.
Impact
Shellkode settled on an auditor from three options on the second day after onboarding. Within three weeks, the company was ISO 27001 certified.
The SOC 2 Type 1 audit that followed took a third of that time, concluding with a clean report in just 7 days.
Beyond the audits themselves, the platform gave the team actionable guidance on how to fulfill framework requirements and maintain compliance between them. Shellkode established security guardrails to accommodate growth and now engages up-market clients armed with ready evidence of its cloud security measures.
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