How AudioStack saves hundreds of hours while deepening trust with customers

THE COMPANY

Create professional audio with AI 10,000x faster

Founded in 2019 in London, AudioStack is a generative AI company that is powering a new generation of audio creation. The platform helps marketing, advertising, radio, and gaming professionals easily create quality audio and drastically reduces audio production cycles from days down to just seconds. AudioStack helps its customers get the audio clips they need while saving them money and time by automating the audio production process.              

Over the last few years, the company has grown substantially as generative AI has gained global popularity. As a result, AudioStack’s customer base has started to shift. The company’s initial customers were publishers and is now starting to attract enterprise and scale-up organizations. Additionally, the business now has reached a global audience, particularly seeing interest in the U.S. market. 

As a result of this growth, Peadar Coyle, the CTO and Co-Founder of AudioStack, says the business is now investing in its enterprise features to meet the needs of these customers. Part of this investment is up-leveling the business’ security and compliance strategy to demonstrate trust amid concerns around the impact of AI. 

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THE CHALLENGE

Earn trust and save time

While interest in AI has grown, the AudioStack team says there’s still some concern from customers about the impact of AI. “There is already some challenge of being a small company — no one knows you and you need to earn the trust of your customer,” Peadar Coyle says. “Being an AI company requires us to build an even deeper level of trust because this technology is largely unknown. We need our customers to see us as a trusted partner to help them implement this.” 

Though trust is vital to the business — the team who is responsible for security and compliance is stretched thin. Peadar co-owns the security and compliance strategy with one of his lead engineers, in addition to owning legal. Peadar’s day-to-day work is primarily focused on people management, external advocacy, conducting design reviews, aligning the sales and product teams, and working on customer-facing initiatives.

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As the business started to work with more enterprises that required additional proof of AudioStack’s strong security posture, doing these security reviews manually took up a significant amount of his time. Peadar knew he needed to standardize the security and legal review process to save time — and that pursuing compliance frameworks could alleviate the friction that came with these manual security reviews. 

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THE SOLUTION

Find a tool that makes building trust easy

Peadar opted to start with pursuing a SOC 2 Type I report first. Given the amount of manual effort that comes with the traditional SOC 2 process and the team’s lack of resources, he knew that compliance automation was his best option to move quickly. The first step in the process for Peadar was picking an auditor — he chose Johannsen — and then he went on to pick a compliance automation vendor. It was important to him that the auditor integrated with the tool he used to get his SOC 2 report. 

At the beginning of his search, Peadar considered a handful of compliance automation platforms and eventually narrowed it down to two solutions: Vanta and a competitor. As he considered these platforms, a few things were top-of-mind. The first was getting support in his timezone. He’d worked with other vendors that offered support exclusively on west coast hours, which made it hard to get help when he needed it. It was also important that the platform integration with the tools AudioStack used and that the product roadmap continued to add relevant integrations for additional technology AudioStack plans to use. Other factors that were important in Peadar’s buying decision were price and sales team responsiveness. 

Ultimately, Peadar chose Vanta as he believed it offered better support, more fully featured integrations than the competitor’s product, and the platform had a steady pace of product updates. He also looked at each vendors’ product roadmaps and decided that Vanta’s vision for trust management was more in line with theirs. 

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THE IMPACT

Get hours back with trust management 

Once he made his decision, Peadar purchased Vanta through the AWS Marketplace partnership, which helped to accelerate the procurement process. He was also able to onboard himself quickly to the platform, spending a day following Vanta’s implementation guide and tours to easily set himself up, connecting his tools with our out-of-the-box integrations, and completed scoping — all without needing a call with a Customer Success Manager. He completed a majority of the setup for AudioStack’s Vanta implementation within the first week.  

After onboarding to the platform, Peadar was able to quickly complete AudioStack’s SOC 2 Type I attestation in late September — just three short months after purchasing Vanta.

Peadar is also saving hours of time as a result of using Vanta’s Access Reviews solution to automate access reviews. Prior to Vanta, he used to do these manually via spreadsheets, which he found to be a time-consuming process and would only increase in complexity as Audiostack scaled and purchased more software. “Within the next 12 months, we’ll probably double the amount of tools we use at Audiostack”, says Peadar. “We’ll also be adding 50% more headcount, which makes it difficult for us to manually keep track of system access.” All in all, Peadar estimates that access reviews that once took him 10 accident-prone hours to complete every quarter now takes him just 30 minutes.

And with AudioStack’s Trust Center, the company is now better positioned for competitive deals. The team is now able to show off its security posture on the website to help build credibility with customers and enable salespeople to push deals forward. It’s also been a valuable source of lead generation for Audiostack, by using it to gather prospect information when they request access to their documents.

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Overall, Peadar says that Vanta saved AudioStack roughly 80-100 hours across the board. He’s also able to quickly create and complete policies that used to take him several hours to do. This is just the beginning for AudioStack’s security and compliance program. The team is currently in the process of getting GDPR compliant and have plans to work on the ISO 27001 and AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) frameworks. Peadar expects to see even more AI-specific compliance standards be created as a result of upcoming AI regulation and anticipates that AudioStack to be adding a new framework to its trust program each year.

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