About Northstar Security Advisors
A one-person security practice in Boston, started in 2021. Northstar works with at most six SaaS companies at a time.
Mara Chen
Founder and principal advisor
Mara Chen started Northstar Security Advisors in 2021. Before that she spent four years as the first security hire at a 140-person B2B software company. She wrote its policies, chose its tooling, answered its customer security questionnaires, and led it through its first SOC 2 Type II audit.
She began her career as a security engineer at a payments startup, where she ran access reviews, vulnerability scanning and the on-call rotation for security alerts.
She holds the CISSP. She lives outside Boston and works with clients across the US and Canada, mostly remotely, with an on-site visit once a quarter when the work calls for it.
Background
- Certification
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- CISSP, Certified Information Systems Security Professional (2019)
- Frameworks
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- SOC 2 (Security, Availability, Confidentiality)
- ISO 27001
- NIST CSF 2.0
- CIS Controls v8
- Before Northstar
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- Head of Security, [B2B software company], 2017 to 2021
- Security Engineer, [payments startup], 2015 to 2017
How engagements run
- Mara runs every engagement herself.
- The person on the fit call is the person in your weekly meeting and the person who writes your policies. Northstar takes on at most six clients at a time.
- Same five phases every time.
- Every engagement follows the Northstar Maturity Framework, so you know on day one what you will receive in week two and week three.
- Your engineers keep their sprints.
- Mara spent six years inside engineering teams. Controls are mapped to the process you already run, and new work goes into your ticket tracker with an estimate.
- Everything stays in your systems.
- Policies live in your wiki, evidence in your compliance platform, tasks in your tracker. Nothing is locked in a consultant portal.
Book a 30-minute fit call with Mara.
Tell her what is driving the work. If Northstar fits, you get a written scope and price within three business days.