Security at a 50-person business doesn't need to be exotic. It needs to be present. The pattern we see, often, is the opposite: an elaborate security policy document nobody reads, paired with nine of the ten basic controls actually missing in production. The companies that get breached aren't usually the ones with poorly-tuned WAFs. They're the ones whose ex-employees still have access to the shared drive eight months later.
Our short list, by leverage: (1) Single sign-on for every business app you can put behind it. (2) Multi-factor authentication, ideally phishing-resistant — passkeys or hardware keys — for every account that supports it. (3) A password manager deployed to the whole team, not just engineering. (4) Endpoint management on every laptop and phone — MDM for Macs, Intune or similar for Windows, MDM for iPhones. (5) Disk encryption verified, not assumed. (6) Automatic OS and browser updates, on a tight schedule. (7) A documented offboarding checklist that's actually run by someone other than the manager of the person leaving.
Notice what's not on that list: a SIEM, a SOC, a penetration test, an annual phishing simulation, a security awareness training course. Those things are not bad, and at certain sizes they become useful — but at 50 people, the seven controls above will reduce your actual risk surface more than the entire enterprise-grade security toolkit your vendor wants to sell you. The order of operations matters: get the seven things done first, in production, working, and only then worry about anything else.
This is also, not coincidentally, the same checklist that maps to most compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) at a small business level. Get the seven controls in place, get them documented, and you're 70% of the way through any compliance project you'll be asked to do in the next two years. Most companies do this the other way around — pay a consultant to start a SOC 2 project, then discover they don't have the underlying controls — and end up paying for the same work twice.