Enhancing your Approach to SOC 2 Compliance

If you have recently completed a SOC 2 audit, congratulations on your commitment to safeguarding your organization and the privacy and security of your customer and client data. Demonstrating adherence to SOC 2’s Trust Services Criteria―security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy―can be time-consuming, requiring significant effort and cross-divisional coordination. 

Once you have achieved compliance, it’s useful to reflect on what practical steps you can take to smooth the process and save time on future compliance efforts. Given subsequent audits are required annually or in some cases, quarterly, organizations can take concrete steps to introduce efficiencies and conserve resources. 

Benefits of an Automated Platform

After your organization defines the scope of the audit and which trust criteria are applicable, you must determine which controls apply, evaluate their effectiveness, remediate any gaps, and gather documented evidence of compliance. This process is not the sole responsibility of the risk management or IT security team; multiple stakeholders across your organization contribute to the process and your audit’s success. 

Manually tracking and coordinating information and observations across multiple departments can be tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. However, finding a solution that helps automate workflows can benefit your organization in several ways, such as:

1. Save time. Replacing manually-generated follow-up emails with streamlined automated documentation requests and reminders vastly reduces the time spent on the audit readiness and follow-up process, decluttering inboxes and leaving more time for strategic responsibilities such as remediation and process improvement. 
2. Improve reporting. Identifying critical issues early on allows for faster remediation and speeds up the audit timeframe. With automation, observations and feedback from responses can be incorporated directly into reports, eliminating surprises later in the process. Management can stay updated on findings and support the resolution of outstanding items. 
3. Simplify mapping. Linking your custom internal SOC 2 controls to the relevant trust services criteria can more easily demonstrate compliance to external auditors and clarify responsibility for internal stakeholders. When controls are mapped, external auditors can easily select a trust services criteria and choose which underlying controls to test. Internal stakeholders also benefit through their familiarity with the process and understanding of the data they need to provide to demonstrate compliance. 
4. Introduce synergies. Organizations can leverage their audit findings to generate additional value for the organization by pursuing compliance with ISO or other related Enterprise Risk Management frameworks. Using your SOC 2 audit data and process as a springboard, additional certifications can be achieved without the need to start from scratch. The findings, issues, and controls evaluated during the SOC 2 audit can often apply to other frameworks and vice versa, saving time during subsequent audits and the pursuit of any additional certifications. 
5. Ease onboarding. Automation simplifies the onboarding process and eases knowledge transfer. Organizations can track resolved and ongoing issues, maintaining detailed and consistent records accessible by new and transitioning employees. 
6. Update frameworks. The SOC 2 Framework was last updated in 2018 and the AICPA is constantly evaluating the framework to ensure it is constructive, effective, and broadly applicable. An automated SOC 2 compliance platform can update control criteria to ensure that you have the most recent and accurate information without having to rely on manual checking for updates. This also eliminates the risk of stale data, missing controls, and wasted resources due to dated versions of industry frameworks.

Adopting automation benefits your organization’s SOC 2 compliance efforts, helps you accelerate subsequent audits, and adds value by reducing the effort required to achieve additional certifications. Importantly, automation reallocates time from manual follow-up and processing to allow your organization to focus on more strategic responsibilities. 

How LogicGate can Help

LogicGate’s SOC 2 Compliance Application on Risk Cloud has automated workflows to allow organizations to evaluate their internal controls, policies, and procedures against AICPA’s five Trust Services Criteria to help them prepare for and achieve a SOC 2 attestation report. Organizations can seamlessly evaluate adherence to the Trust Services Criteria, demonstrate compliance, and assure customers they have the infrastructure, tools, and processes to protect their data. To learn more about LogicGate’s Risk Cloud and our SOC 2 Compliance Application visit logicgate.com or request a demo. 

Learn how one LogicGate customer, Amount, used Risk Cloud to establish their own robust processes, gather evidence of controls, and attain Type 2, Soc 1, and 2 certifications. Read the full case study.

SOC 1®, SOC 2® and SOC 3® are registered trademarks of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in the United States. The AICPA Trust Services Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy is copyrighted by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. All rights reserved.

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Vince Dour

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