Case Studies | SaaS B2B

From compliance blocker to revenue accelerator

Well-Architected Security and Compliance Accelerator

About

A SaaS B2B business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

The feasibility study framed the customer problem around four focus areas, each owned by a line-of-business buyer rather than the security team alone.

Blocked enterprise pipeline

Qualified opportunities stall in vendor security review because the seller cannot produce SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation. For the chief revenue officer, that is real ARR sitting frozen and, in many cases, lost to competitors who can clear the security bar.

Slow and costly compliance

The traditional path to attestation typically runs six to twelve months and carries a heavy consulting cost, delivering a point-in-time result that is outdated almost immediately. For the chief financial officer this is a large, unpredictable spend on the critical path to revenue.

Manual audit-preparation burden

Hundreds of hours a year go into manual evidence collection and security questionnaires, pulling engineering and operations away from the roadmap. For the chief operating officer this is sustained, low-value toil that scales badly with every new enterprise deal.

Blocked market expansion

Without attestations, whole regulated segments in healthcare, financial services and government stay out of reach, capping the addressable market and the growth story presented to boards and investors.

Solution

Cloud Combinator and the client designed the accelerator as a repeatable twelve-week programme, deliberately anchored to business outcomes so that every technical step maps to a revenue, cost or risk result the executive team can see.

8-12 wks

Targeted time to SOC 2 readiness, vs 6-12 months (projected)

Up to £10M

Targeted blocked pipeline released per customer (projected)

40-60%

Targeted reduction in audit and consulting cost (projected)

By the numbers:

  • 8-12 wks - Targeted time to SOC 2 readiness, vs 6-12 months (projected)
  • Up to £10M - Targeted blocked pipeline released per customer (projected)
  • 40-60% - Targeted reduction in audit and consulting cost (projected)
Changes

Because this is a feasibility engagement, the outcome is the study's verdict and the target metrics set for the pilot, not delivered production results. The joint study assessed the accelerator across commercial, technical and operational dimensions and recommended proceeding to a three-customer design-partner pilot. The figures below are the study's own projected targets and illustrative model, and are marked accordingly.

  • Commercial feasibility rated excellent — The study sized an UK addressable market of GBP 60M to GBP 75M and cited external evidence that most B2B SaaS firms lose enterprise deals to compliance gaps. These are projected market figures.
  • Technical feasibility rated high — The accelerator builds on mature, production-grade AWS services and the client's proven AWS integration, using a read-only IAM role that keeps the approach minimally invasive and privacy-compliant.
  • Operational feasibility rated strong — Both partners confirmed capacity to run a three-customer pilot without additional hiring, with a standardised playbook designed to scale to 10 to 15 customers.
  • Illustrative return — A base-case model for a GBP 20M ARR customer projected roughly 604 per cent first-year ROI, driven mainly by pulling forward blocked enterprise deals. This is an illustrative projection, not a measured result.
  • Handover — Each engagement is designed to leave the customer with an executive scorecard, an audit-ready evidence repository, sales enablement collateral and a clear expansion roadmap.

With the feasibility study complete and the first design partners identified, Cloud Combinator and the client move next to concurrent pilot delivery, then to a BOX-funded go-to-market campaign, with an AWS Marketplace listing on the roadmap. The ambition is a repeatable, AWS-native accelerator that lets high-growth SaaS companies turn compliance into sales velocity.

AWS Stack

AWS Organizations

For multi-account governance and service control policies.

AWS Security Hub

For aggregating findings across the AWS estate.

AWS Config

For continuous compliance verification and automated remediation.

AWS CloudTrail

For a comprehensive audit trail of API and access activity.

Amazon GuardDuty

For intelligent threat detection and anomaly monitoring.

AWS Well-Architected Tool

For formal Security Pillar assessment and gap tracking.

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