In this guide
Compliance rarely arrives as one tidy project. It shows up as a customer questionnaire, an investor request, a new regulation and an audit deadline, often at once. The trick is sequencing, so each step builds the evidence the next one needs instead of starting over. This is the order we see work for growing companies.
Phase 1: Get your house in order
Start with the controls every framework expects: access control, MFA, asset and vendor inventories, logging, and an incident-response plan. None of this is wasted; it underpins SOC 2, ISO 27001 and DPDP alike.
Phase 2: Pick the framework your customers ask for
For US and enterprise buyers that is usually SOC 2 (begin with a Type I to show progress). For a broad, internationally recognised base it is ISO 27001. They share most controls, so if you are likely to need both, plan them together.
Phase 3: Cover your regulatory obligations
If you handle the personal data of people in India, build in DPDP: the DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025, with the substantive obligations applying from 13 May 2027, so there is a clear runway to prepare. For the EU and UK, GDPR. These reuse much of the security work from phase 1 rather than adding a separate programme.
Phase 4: Make it repeatable
Turn the questionnaire responses, evidence and audits into a routine you can run every year, so renewals and customer security reviews stop being fire drills.
Get the full roadmap
The download lays this out as a quarter-by-quarter plan with the triggers, owners and evidence for each step, so you can map it onto your own year.