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First 7 Days — from first scan to operating program

The Quickstart gets you through your first scan, finding, ticket, and alert. This plan takes the next step: seven focused sessions that end with the platform running as a program — scheduled scans, owned findings, SLAs, alerts, compliance tracking, and an executive view.

Each "day" is a working session of roughly one to two hours. Compress or stretch the calendar as you like — the order is what matters, because each day builds on the previous one.

Who does what

Days 1–4 need the Admin or Security Manager role (connecting accounts and configuring scans require management access). Day 5 is natural Compliance Officer territory, and Day 7 is where Viewer/executive accounts start to matter. See Roles, Teams & API Keys.

Day 1 — Establish visibility

Goal: everything you're responsible for is connected and discovered.

  1. Set up your team and invite colleagues with appropriate roles — Roles, Teams & API Keys.
  2. Connect your cloud accounts (AWS, GCP, Azure) with read-only access — Connecting Cloud Accounts. For the exact permissions per provider, see Required Permissions; granting at the AWS Organization / GCP org node / Azure management group covers current and future accounts with one binding.
  3. Connect container registries (ECR, Artifact Registry/GCR, ACR, Docker Hub) — Container Security. The same cloud credentials often unlock these.
  4. Onboard Kubernetes clusters — EKS, GKE, and AKS clusters are auto-discovered from connected cloud accounts; on-prem clusters onboard with a read-only kubeconfig or service-account token — Kubernetes Security.
  5. Review what was found — Asset Inventory.

Done when: every production cloud account shows Connected / Active, and Asset Inventory lists resources from each of them.

Day 2 — Establish a security baseline

Goal: one full scan of everything connected, so you have a "day zero" picture.

  1. Cloud posture: an initial scan can start automatically when an account connects — trigger one from Cloud Security for any account that hasn't scanned yet, and confirm each account's scan reached Completed on the Scans page (How Cloud Scans Run).
  2. Run scans for the surfaces you own: web applications and APIs (Native Scans), container images (Container Security), and clusters (Kubernetes Security).
  3. Connect a repository and run code scanning — SAST, secrets, SCA, SBOM, and license checks — Code Command Center.
  4. Open Vulnerability Management and note your baseline: total findings by severity. This is the number you'll measure progress against.

Done when: each connected surface has at least one Completed scan, and you've recorded the baseline counts.

Day 3 — Prioritize

Goal: know which ten findings matter most, and why.

  1. In Vulnerability Management, sort by priority rank (P0–P4) — it rolls severity (CVSS), exploit probability (EPSS), and known exploitation (CISA KEV) into one order of work.
  2. Promote the findings that represent real business exposure into the Risk Register with owners and treatment plans.

Done when: your top findings have named owners, and at least your most critical items exist as governed risks with treatment plans.

Day 4 — Operationalize

Goal: the platform chases the work, not you.

  1. Create SLA policies — the Create Default Policies button gives you documented starting points per severity and environment — SLA Management.
  2. Connect Jira so critical findings become tickets automatically and status flows both ways.
  3. Set up Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email notifications; on Slack, add routing rules so critical findings reach the right channel — Notifications.
  4. Schedule recurring scans in Management → Unified Scheduler — a daily incremental plus weekly full scan for cloud accounts, and schedules for web, container, Kubernetes, and code scans. Turn on schedule failure notifications so a silently broken scan can't hide — Scan Management & Scheduling.

Done when: a test notification has arrived in your channel, a finding is linked to a real ticket, SLA policies are active, and every scan type you rely on has a schedule.

Day 5 — Configure compliance

Goal: continuous compliance tracking against the frameworks you actually answer to.

  1. Activate the frameworks that apply to you — start with one or two, not ten — Supported Frameworks lists the full catalog (ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, DPDP Act, SEBI CSCRF, and more).
  2. Review your posture on the Compliance Dashboard — scores populate from the scans you ran on Day 2 via Autonomous Compliance.
  3. Open the Evidence Hub and run Collect All; review what was auto-collected and upload manual evidence (policies, screenshots) where automation can't reach.
  4. Turn failing controls that matter into governed risks — compliance gaps can be promoted into the Risk Register just like findings.
  5. Indian regulated entities: run the DPDP readiness assessment (DPDP Act (India) Privacy) and read India Regulatory Readiness for the RBI / SEBI CSCRF / CERT-In mapping.

Done when: at least one framework is active with a real score, and its top gaps are either evidenced or tracked as risks.

Day 6 — Shift left

Goal: new code is scanned before it ships, not after.

  1. Connect your GitHub or Bitbucket repositories for SAST, secrets, SCA, SBOM, and license scanning — Code Command Center.
  2. Add scanning to your pipeline — the GitHub Action, or plain curl against the REST API from any CI system (Automation Use Cases has a copy-paste release-gate recipe).
  3. Decide your gate policy: which severities block a build. Start permissive (fail on Critical only) and tighten once the team trusts the signal.
  4. On GitHub, install the GitHub App for inline PR annotations and automatic scans — CLI & CI/CD.

Done when: a pull request or pipeline run has been scanned automatically, and a Critical finding would block the build.

Day 7 — Executive visibility

Goal: leadership can see posture without asking you for a status update.

  1. Review the Dashboard trends: security score, findings by severity, and recent activity.
  2. Check the SLA Breach Dashboard — this is your operational health metric from now on — SLA Management.
  3. Generate reports for your stakeholders — executive and audit outputs in PDF and HTML — Reports & AI Assistance. AI summaries turn scan results into narrative for non-specialist readers.
  4. Give leadership their own access: a Viewer role for dashboards, or Auditor for read-only evidence and report export — Roles, Teams & API Keys.

Done when: a stakeholder outside the security team has viewed a dashboard or received a report without you exporting it by hand.

After the first week