What do you like best about the product?

Laika project management capabilities and having a dedicated compliance architect to help guide you through the complex compliance process.

What do you dislike about the product?

They have integrations to most of the tools we use. It will be helpful if they can integrate with JumpCloud.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

SOC 2 Compliance process.

What do you like best about the product?

Laika has an easy to follow framework and other tools that make it more convenient to complete the required tasks on our way towards compliance. Engaging the process with Laika allows me to complete the required tasks and also continue to operate our daily business obligations.

What do you dislike about the product?

I haven't found any downside to working with Laika. All the necessary materials, resources and organization are right at hand.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Simple organization, where does one begin in this process? Laika organizes our limited time and keeps us directed. Examples are available for us to use and adapt to our unique circumstances without spending the time we don't have to reinvent the wheel!

What do you like best about the product?

The system is phenomenal for organizing and maintaining compliance policies and procedures. They have also been very helpful in our SOC Type 1 & 2.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing to date. I have been impressed with each module.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Laika has assisted with model regulatory compliance policies as well as the SOC Type 1 & 2.

What do you like best about the product?

Their tools and templates are readily available.

What do you dislike about the product?

Resource availability for help and time taken to reply to any queries.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Providing a platform to ease your certification process. For us it's helping because we are new to the process and these tools help organize things.

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate the human approach to Laika's platform. We have a dedicated Customer Success Manager that is available to guide us through the process and provide any expertise regarding compliance efforts.

What do you dislike about the product?

Most companies approaching compliance may not have a background in managing this process. The onboarding and education of the experience could be better explained upfront. There were moments when the sales pitch didn't align with the experience. Hand-holding is required for first-timers in this process, especially when working with start-ups.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are working through SOC2

What do you like best about the product?

We are a small company selling a subscription product to businesses. At our scale, it would've been nearly impossible to spin up a homegrown compliance project to attain SOC 2 compliance.

Thanks to Laika, we are now SOC 2 Compliant. Their help was invaluable in many ways:
- They have the SOC 2 framework organized in their application so that each step (known as a "control") is clear and actionable.
- They have a bank of templates for many purposes: meeting minutes, committee charters, policies and procedures. Using these, we could edit each to fit our situation and have a coherent and comprehensive set of documents and guides for managing compliance.
- Laika employees have expertise in various security/compliance implementations and guided us through many unfamiliar topics. For instance, a standard compliance requirement is to have a system to surface issues and notify key staff as needed on a variety of levels: the hosting / server system, the code base, the application performance and errors, etc. Laika had guides and recommended vendors for each of these, without which we would've been trying to figure each out independently. We went through probably two dozen challenging topics this way with active guidance from Laika's experts.
- Similarly, there were many occasions where we had some aspect of security set up well, and either it needed to be extended a bit or documented correctly to demonstrate proper compliance. Again, Laika's experts carefully examined each of these questions and found a path to do that, which would've been very challenging to figure out without their help.
- Laika has a lot of integrations that reduce the amount of work needed. For instance, we needed to have specific security settings on our code repositories, and we needed to have background checks on our employees centrally documented. Both were one-time integrations with Laika that automatically covered the necessary evidence for the compliance audit.

So, in short, we couldn't have gotten SOC 2 Compliance without Laika in any realistic, affordable way; we wouldn't have had the expertise on security compliance that they painstakingly taught us during the process. If I were in any other startup or even a larger company that had to do this process again, I would absolutely do it with Laika again.

What do you dislike about the product?

I didn't see any significant downsides. It costs a bit to get this done, but it wouldn't cost any less doing it some other way (in fact, having done some research on this, Laika seemed like the best deal compared to other offerings or alternatives). It's a long process, especially if you're starting from scratch and are a small team as we were, but again, with Laika we not only did it faster than we would've solo, we probably wouldn't in fact have done it at all.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The problem is that many customers in B2B or even B2C will demand some officially documented security standards, and we would have had a tough time getting a SOC 2 certification without outside help. Not being SOC 2 compliant concretely impacts our ability to make sales and keep existing business customers. Many of our customers have a security screen upfront and on an ongoing basis. Though we followed various security standards in practice, without a comprehensive system, it's hard to identify all the gaps, especially gaps in documentation or procedures and in certain more nuanced security technology implementations that are not normally in scope for development at smaller companies. It's also equally hard to document what you're doing in a standard way that is intelligible to customers, even when you are, in fact, doing the right thing in terms of security. Therefore, filling out the many security questionnaires we received was extremely stressful and time-consuming. Going through this process with Laika we a) added capabilities that we didn't have previously, so we can now respond to these requests confidently and comprehensively, and b) in several cases we actually had the right capabilities or systems, sometimes well above average in fact, but we just didn't know the proper language to communicate them correctly to customers. Now, having gone through a comprehensive process with hands on help from Laika, we flipped these security questionnaires, which often slowed down sales, from something unpleasant to an opportunity to generate more business.

What do you like best about the product?

Their product is designed to where Laika functions as a systems monitoring tool after the first year with them. This makes subsequent audits easier and their product more valuable to the enterprise customer.

What do you dislike about the product?

The technology-to-human interaction balance is still something they need to improve upon. For example, we submit evidence for review, and the system immediately says the item is closed. However, two weeks later, a human on the Laika end reopens the object, resulting in time loss. This could be done more synchronized than a two-week asynchronous gap that costs enterprises valuable time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

They provide a technology platform that lives with the enterprise year after year to remain compliant with SOC standards and function as an ongoing systems monitoring module for the enterprise customer.

What do you like best about the product?

As a small company, SOC 2 was a huge undertaking. Tracking the various controls, understanding what was required in terms of evidence, and compiling all of that information was a daunting task. Laika provided a great platform to help track everything, provided resources for creating all of the required policies and documentation, and had professionals available to help us where we did have additional questions or needs. In addition, Laika's library of integrations with third party and cloud services helped in the evidence collection process, decreasing the amount of work required from us.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some of the SOC 2 controls had supporting pages to help further explain what was required for individual controls, however a lot of times I still needed to reach out to the Laika team for further explanation; so that is a possible area for improvement.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main problems I see Laika as solving are making compliance possible for smaller businesses without as many dedicated resources for this type of effort, and also making it easier to track duplicate evidence for multiple overlapping compliance types, such as SOC 2 and PCI-DSS.

What do you like best about the product?

Laika has an easy and intuitive user interface. Its layout is easy to follow and the ramp-up time to use Laika is minimal.

What do you dislike about the product?

So far - nothing stands out for our users to date.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We used Laika to help us achieve our SOC 2 Type 1 and GDPR certifications. We are in the process of achieving our SOC 2 Type 2 certification.

What do you like best about the product?

The most beneficial aspects of Laika are 1) their customer support team assigned to you, 2) ease of setup, and 3) best practice templates.

What do you dislike about the product?

Areas that could use some improvement include integration with AWS GovCloud, which I believe is on their product roadmap and easier reference to policies and procedures already stored in Laika rather than uploading them again as proof of compliance.,

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are a startup in healthcare which is a regulated industry. Compliance is important to us for various reasons, both strategic and tactical. Laika reduces the time and effort needed to establish and prove compliance and confirm or adopt best practices when applicable.