If you are a SaaS vendor selling to large enterprise customers—not just individual users or small businesses—you should expect compliance diligence early in the sales process. Enterprise customers will often require you to demonstrate that your legal, security, and operational infrastructure is in place before they are willing to sign.
At a minimum, you should be prepared to provide core compliance and customer-facing documents such as an information security plan, a disaster recovery and business continuity plan, a privacy policy, appropriate insurance coverage (including cyber insurance), a service level agreement, data protection documentation such as a GDPR data processing agreement where relevant, and accessibility-related commitments or features. Over time, many enterprise customers will also expect stronger evidence of controls, including a SOC 2 report.
It is not enough to say that your cloud provider—such as AWS—has the necessary certifications or controls. Your customers are contracting with you, not with your infrastructure provider. That means you need your own policies, controls, contractual documents, and compliance posture.
Bottom Line
If your goal is to sell into the enterprise market, compliance is not optional. The sooner you put these materials and controls in place, the easier it will be to pass procurement, security review, and legal review with sophisticated customers.