Shiptheory Security Assessment

CFO

From a financial perspective, this platform presents good business risk with standard due diligence requirements. Shiptheory's B-grade security posture (68/100) represents above-average security controls that align with typical enterprise vendor management frameworks.

Business Risk Analysis

The platform demonstrates solid identity and access management capabilities, which reduces the primary operational risk of unauthorized access to shipping operations and customer data. This foundation provides adequate protection for business-critical logistics workflows that could disrupt revenue operations if compromised.

However, significant data protection gaps present material compliance exposure. The absence of encryption and data privacy controls creates potential regulatory liability, particularly for organizations handling customer shipping information across multiple jurisdictions. This deficiency could impact procurement timelines as legal review will require additional scrutiny of data handling agreements and may necessitate enhanced contractual protections.

The lack of formal compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) creates vendor management complexity requiring customized audit procedures rather than relying on standard third-party attestations. This increases due diligence costs and extends procurement cycles, though the absence of breach history provides reassurance about operational stability.

Infrastructure and application security visibility limitations prevent full risk assessment of business continuity capabilities. This gap requires enhanced vendor questionnaires and potentially on-site security reviews to validate operational resilience for mission-critical shipping operations.

The unknown pricing model complicates total cost of ownership analysis and budget planning, requiring detailed commercial discussions to establish predictable cost structures for multi-year agreements.

CFO Recommendation

Recommend approval with enhanced vendor monitoring including quarterly security assessments and mandatory data protection improvements within six months. Require comprehensive cyber insurance verification and establish clear SLA penalties for security incidents affecting business operations. Implement phased rollout to validate operational performance before full enterprise deployment.

CTO/Developer

From a technical integration perspective, Shiptheory demonstrates good integration capabilities with standard developer tooling, though limited security visibility constrains comprehensive risk assessment.

Technical Assessment

The platform's identity and access management foundation shows promise with a 70/100 score, indicating solid authentication mechanisms and user provisioning capabilities. This suggests their API likely implements standard OAuth 2.0 or similar modern authentication protocols, which simplifies integration with enterprise identity providers and reduces custom authentication overhead for our development teams.

However, the absence of comprehensive API security documentation and encryption specifications creates significant blind spots in our integration risk assessment. Without visibility into data protection controls, API rate limiting, or endpoint security measures, we cannot accurately scope the security controls needed for production deployment. This data gap forces our teams to assume worst-case scenarios and implement additional security layers that may be redundant or insufficient.

The lack of formal compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) indicates potential gaps in their security development lifecycle and change management processes. While not prohibitive for integration, this suggests their API may lack enterprise-grade security features like comprehensive audit logging, secure configuration management, or formal vulnerability disclosure processes that streamline ongoing maintenance and compliance reporting.

From a development velocity perspective, the limited technical transparency suggests we'll need to allocate additional discovery time during integration planning to validate API security controls, data handling procedures, and monitoring capabilities that aren't documented in their public technical specifications.

CTO Recommendation

Approve for integration with enhanced security monitoring and additional API security controls. Require security questionnaire completion, API security assessment, and implementation of additional encryption-in-transit verification before production deployment to mitigate documented security visibility gaps.

Legal/Compliance

From a legal and compliance perspective, this platform presents moderate compliance risk requiring enhanced due diligence and contractual protections due to significant gaps in regulatory certifications and data protection documentation.

Shiptheory's compliance profile reveals several concerning deficiencies that could expose the organization to regulatory liability. The absence of SOC 2 Type II certification raises questions about the vendor's commitment to information security controls that auditors and regulators expect from SaaS providers handling business-critical data. Without SOC 2, we lack third-party validation of security policies, procedures, and operational effectiveness required for due diligence documentation.

The platform's GDPR compliance status remains undocumented, creating potential liability exposure for cross-border data transfers and processing activities. Under GDPR Article 28, organizations must ensure data processors provide " sufficient guarantees" of compliance - documentation we cannot verify without proper certifications. This gap complicates our ability to establish compliant Data Processing Agreements and may trigger additional due diligence requirements from our data protection officer.

The absence of industry-standard compliance frameworks also impacts our vendor risk management obligations under various regulatory requirements. Many compliance auditors expect enterprise vendors to maintain certifications that demonstrate adherence to baseline security controls. Without these certifications, we may face increased scrutiny during compliance audits and potentially higher cyber insurance premiums.

The platform's identity and access management capabilities show reasonable implementation, suggesting some technical controls are in place. However, the lack of documented compliance programs means we cannot rely on vendor assurances for regulatory reporting purposes.

Conditional approval requiring enhanced contractual protections including detailed security exhibit, audit rights, breach notification procedures, and indemnification provisions for regulatory penalties. Recommend annual security assessments until SOC 2 certification obtained.