CASE STUDY
Metaplane accelerates business growth thanks to Vanta
Shortened sales cycles with SOC 2 attestation
Eight hours of work saved per week
Easy policy templates for first-time auditors
As an emerging company, Vanta lowered the barrier to entry to obtain a SOC 2 and made our business more secure on a continued basis. If all companies were on Vanta, the internet and B2B world would be a safer and more secure place.
Kevin Hu
The company
Creating warehouse visibility
Metaplane provides data observability for modern data stacks, from warehouses like Snowflake to BI dashboards like Looker, and everything in between. Metaplane allows you to monitor your entire warehouse quickly and identify downstream impact with automated warehouse-to-BI lineage.
The challenge
Too much time on questionnaires
While Metaplane helps companies trust their data, those same companies trust Metaplane to securely access their metadata. Ensuring high standards to protect customer data was critical for customer acquisition in this age of data breaches and increased privacy concerns.
Without having a SOC 2, Metaplane was spending hours completing lengthy security questionnaires to fulfill the needs of potential customers asking for proof of compliance. As an emerging leader in the category of data observability, the speed of iterating on customer feedback was critical. Each hour spent in security review was an hour taken away from customer or product development.
The solution
Taking the guesswork out
Like Vanta, Metaplane is a Y Combinator graduate. From the YC community, the team learned about the benefits of a SOC 2 certification as a go-to-market strategy. Their "aha moment" was seeing how Vanta's policy templates and the Vanta team's expertise removed the guesswork in understanding the required time investment.
While the Metaplane team was well-versed in security best practices, this is the first time the Metaplane team had led a SOC 2 audit, and had to negotiate the trade-off between achieving SOC 2 compliance and investing in other initiatives. The trade-off turned out to be minimal. Having the foundation built from day one, it’s easier to evolve compliance practices as Metaplane scales and matures because it’s all consolidated in Vanta.
The impact
Faster sales deals, broader prospect base
Vanta’s team and expertise around the SOC 2 process significantly decreased Metaplane’s time to get audit ready and they were able to spend more time on validating their product market fit.
Companies that wouldn’t have adopted a data observability solution are now happy customers because they are SOC 2 compliant. This has allowed their business to scale up faster and be considered by a wider pool of potential customers across various industries including financial services and healthcare.
With a SOC 2 in hand, their time to close sales is dramatically shorter, with customers having peace of mind about the security of their data. The security approval process is significantly shorter through expedited questionnaires and sometimes cut out entirely, saving upwards of eight hours of work a week. With customer demand increasing each day, it was critical to minimize time on security reviews.
