The Minimum Viable Cybersecurity & IT Solutions for Life Sciences: What You Actually Need (and What You Don’t)
If you’re an early- or mid-stage life sciences company, you’re protecting some of the most valuable assets in the world—proprietary research, clinical data, and intellectual property—often before you have a dedicated IT or security team. So, what are the minimum viable cybersecurity and IT solutions for life sciences companies that are growing fast, but don’t want to overspend or over-engineer? I’m asked this question regularly, so I’ve put together a list of the must-have cybersecurity and IT solutions for life sciences companies between 10 and 150 employees that need to pass customer, partner, and regulatory security reviews.
Before we get started, let’s clear something up. The answer is not “enterprise-grade everything.” You don’t need a SOC. You don’t need a SIEM on day one. You don’t need MDR, next-gen firewalls, or dozens of disconnected tools that require a team to manage.
What you do need is a minimum viable foundation of cybersecurity and IT solutions for life sciences that reduce risk, satisfy customer and partner security reviews, and scale cleanly as your company grows.
That’s the lens I’m using here. This isn’t theory. It’s based on what our Pennant team sees working (and failing) for life sciences organizations every day. So, let’s dive in.
The Biggest IT Mistakes Early-Stage Life Sciences Companies Make (and How to Fix These)
Early-stage life sciences companies rarely fail security reviews because they lack tools. They fail because they lack foundational controls.
Auditors, CROs, pharma partners, and enterprise customers aren’t asking if you bought the latest product. They’re asking questions like:
Can you prove who has access to research and clinical data?
Can you prevent phishing-led account takeovers?
Can you explain how you’d detect and respond to an incident?
Minimum viable IT solutions for life sciences organizations should solve those problems first.
At this stage, the real goals are straightforward:
Secure, efficient, affordable IT that scales with your science
Passing customer, partner, and vendor security assessments
Preventing common attack vectors such as:
Phishing → token theft → data exfiltration
Lost or stolen device exposure
Former employee access
This is your starting point for real-world risk, and you scale from here.
The Microsoft-Native Foundation is the MVP of IT Solutions for Life Sciences
When people ask me what the true security MVP stack looks like for biotech and life sciences, my honest answer is Microsoft. It offers both business productivity tools and security tools for your IT infrastructure.
Yes, we’re Microsoft partners—but that’s not why this works. It works because Microsoft gives growing companies the most coverage for the lowest incremental cost, and it’s relatively easy to use. Identity, devices, email, collaboration, data governance, and logging all live in a single ecosystem that scales without forcing you into enterprise bloat.
Ironically, I regularly find life sciences organizations that don’t realize they have security tools as part of their Microsoft licenses. So, let’s get to the bottom of what minimum viable IT solutions for life sciences actually look like and what tools to use, starting with early-stage organizations and working our way up.
1. Minimum Viable IT Solutions for Life Sciences Under 25 Employees: Identity First
For organizations under roughly 25 employees, security lives and dies with identity. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (VDBIR) found 22% of breaches start from compromised credentials. Your perimeter is not a firewall. Your perimeter is identity control to stop attackers who have your credentials.
That starts with Microsoft Entra ID and Conditional Access. At a minimum, you should be enforcing:
MFA for all users, without exception
Blocking legacy authentication entirely
Restricting access from high-risk countries
Automatically responding to risky sign-ins with forced password resets
Blocking access for high-risk users until the risk is resolved
These controls stop the vast majority of account takeovers. From a cost-to-impact standpoint, identity protection is one of the most powerful cybersecurity and IT solutions for life sciences organizations. If attackers can’t authenticate, they can’t exfiltrate data—no matter how sophisticated they are.
2. Device Security as a Core IT Solution for Life Sciences Companies
Identity controls only work if devices are trusted, which is why endpoint management comes next. Even if you only have eight laptops today, enrolling them in Microsoft Intune early saves enormous pain later.
Your minimum viable device baseline should include:
All company devices enrolled in Intune
Full disk encryption with BitLocker
Screen lock and idle timeout policies
Remote wipe capability for lost or stolen devices
Removal of unnecessary local admin rights
This is a crucial part of modern IT solutions for life sciences, especially once research data enters the picture. One lost laptop can become a breach.
3. Email and Collaboration Security
The 2025 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report found that phishing was the most common initial attack vector, responsible for roughly 16% of breaches and among the most expensive breaches. So, email and collaboration security must round out the foundation of early-stage IT solutions for life sciences. Your team not only needs cybersecurity awareness training, but also security controls.
At a minimum, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should be configured with:
Safe Links and Safe Attachments
Anti-impersonation policies for executives and domains
Properly configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
A built-in phish reporting button in Outlook
These controls dramatically reduce the likelihood that one bad email leads to a breach. They’re also a common focus area during security assessments, making them essential IT solutions for life sciences companies.
The good news is that many organizations already own these capabilities through Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Entra ID P2. The real work (and biggest mistakes) lies in configuration, not procurement. Next, we’ll cover what to add as you grow.
Minimum Viable IT Solutions for Life Sciences for 25-100 Employees: Add Proof and Control
Once you cross roughly 25 employees, security expectations change. Customers, partners, and regulators want evidence that you control access, data, and response. You still don’t need 40 tools; you can go deeper into the Microsoft stack.
Identity maturity is the first area that needs to evolve. Entra ID P2 should be extended to all users, with Privileged Identity Management (PIM) controlling administrative access. Session controls, sign-in frequency, access reviews for apps and groups, and tighter geographic policies demonstrate that access is intentional, time-bound, and regularly reviewed.
To auditors, this proves you actually control who can access sensitive systems—an essential requirement for secure IT solutions for life sciences.
Endpoint Detection, Email Hardening, and Data Governance for Life Sciences IT
Endpoint security also deepens at this stage. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint should be fully deployed, with attack surface reduction rules enforced across devices. Device risk scores should feed directly into Conditional Access, so unhealthy or compromised devices are automatically blocked from accessing research data.
Email and collaboration protections should also be tightened. That means stricter impersonation rules for executives, partners, and domains; a formal user-reported phishing workflow; and DMARC enforcement set to reject, not monitor.
The most significant addition at this stage is data governance through Microsoft Purview. This is where many growing companies stumble.
A minimum viable Purview implementation should include:
Sensitivity labels applied to research and clinical data
Encryption required for external sharing
DLP policies for email, SharePoint, and OneDrive
Retention policies for research and communications
Audit search and activity explorer enabled
These controls prove you know where sensitive data lives and how it’s protected—core expectations for IT solutions for life sciences companies working with external partners.
Visibility, Logging, and Offboarding in IT Solutions for Life Sciences
You still don’t need a full SOC, but you do need visibility. Lightweight use of Microsoft Sentinel provides extended log retention, basic alerting for risky sign-ins and data exfiltration, and a central place to answer the inevitable question: How would you detect this?
Finally, governance and offboarding must be provable. Access reviews for Microsoft 365 groups and applications, documented termination workflows, quarterly admin reviews, and automatic removal from licensing and access groups all show that access doesn’t linger after employees leave.
From a licensing perspective, this stage is still largely Microsoft-native, either Microsoft 365 E5 or a combination of Business Premium, Entra ID P2, Defender add-ons, and Sentinel. The difference is depth and intentionality, not sprawl. As you grow from here, we like to introduce Arctic Wolf and some additional tools for more cyber-mature companies. Drop us a note if you’d like to chat about more recommendations.
Final Thoughts on Minimum Viable IT Solutions for Life Sciences
Minimum viable doesn’t mean minimal effort. It means investing where risk is real, controls are defensible, and scale is built in from day one.
When growing life sciences companies get this right, they look far more mature than their headcount suggests, and they avoid painful rebuilds later. On a side note, we also see a LOT of money wasted when organizations don’t properly track and manage their licenses. So, we now offer that as part of our Microsoft services. If you need help buying and implementing a Microsoft solution, or you need advice from a life sciences IT expert, let’s connect to discuss how our Pennant life sciences IT consulting services or fractional support can help.