SOC 2 Compliance: Why Your Company Needs to Stay SOC 2 Compliant

All businesses seek to be reliable, safe, and trustworthy for their customers, especially those dealing with and storing customer data. Neglecting such attributes will ensure you do not maintain a customer base for very long. Therefore, you must implement a system that you can trust to ensure that your customers continue to trust your business.

SOC 2 is a framework that all technology service or SaaS organizations that keep customer data in the cloud must follow. The framework ensures that organizational controls and policies successfully safeguard the privacy and security of customer and client data.

This article will see everything there is to know about SOC 2 compliance.

A Brief History of SOC

SOC 2's predecessor, SOC 1, was created by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to assess the efficacy of service organization controls on financial reporting. In response to increased concerns about data privacy and security, they added SOC 2.

All service providers that process and store client data must comply with SOC 2. Auditors use the AICPA's Statement on Standards for Certification Engagements No. 18, which prioritizes data security, to create the SOC 2 attestation of compliance.

SOC 2 mandates that businesses develop and adhere to stringent information security policies and procedures. With the SOC 2 report attesting to your company's compliance, you can rest easy knowing that the data you process is secure — something extremely essential in today's environment.

Explaining SOC 2 Compliance

The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) developed SOC 2, a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations that describes how firms maintain client data.

A SOC 2 report gets tailored to each organization's specific needs. Each organization can develop controls that follow trust principles, depending on its business practices. These internal reports provide crucial information about how an organization maintains its data to its regulators, business partners, and suppliers. SOC 2 reports get divided into two categories:

• Type I: Type I describes the organization's systems and designs per the applicable trust principles.
• Type II: The operational efficiency of these systems is described in Type II.

Essentially, every technological service provider or SaaS company that processes or maintains client data must comply with SOC 2. To preserve the integrity of their data systems and safeguards, such firms' third-party vendors, other partners, or support organizations should likewise be SOC 2 compliant.

The Five Trust Principles of SOC 2

Outside auditors offer SOC 2 certification. Based on the systems and processes in place, they assess the extent to which a vendor conforms with one or more of the five trust principles.

Following that, the Trust Principles are as follows:

• Security: The security principle refers to preventing unwanted access to system resources. Access controls help prevent system abuse, data theft or unauthorized removal, software misuse, and incorrect information manipulation or disclosure. Network and web application firewalls (WAFs), two-factor authentication, and intrusion detection are essential IT security solutions to prevent security breaches that lead to unwanted access to systems and data.
• Availability: The availability principle refers to the system's, product’s, or service's accessibility as specified in a contract or Service Level Agreement (SLA). As a result, both parties agree on the minimum acceptable performance level for system availability. This guideline does not apply to system functioning or usability, but it does apply to security-related criteria that could affect availability. Network performance and availability, site failover, and security incident management are crucial in this setting.
• Processing Integrity: The processing integrity principle considers whether a system accomplishes its goal. Thus, data processing must be accurate, complete, timely, and approved. On the other hand, processing integrity does not always imply data integrity. If data contains problems before entering the system, the processing entity is usually not responsible for discovering them. Data processing monitoring can help ensure processing integrity in combination with quality assurance processes.
• Confidentiality: Data gets considered confidential if it can only be accessed and disclosed by a limited number of people or organizations. Business plans, intellectual property, internal price lists, and other sensitive financial information are examples of data intended only for company people. Encryption is a crucial safeguard for maintaining confidentiality during data transfer. You can protect information being processed or kept on computer systems via network and application firewalls, as well as strict access controls.
• Privacy: The privacy principle governs how the system collects, uses, retains, discloses, and disposes of personal information by an organization's privacy notice and the AICPA's Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP). Moreover, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is information that you may use to identify an individual, such as name, address, Social Security number). Some personal information about health, race, sexuality, and religion is also considered sensitive and requires extra safeguards. You must implement controls to secure all PII from unauthorized access.

The Importance of SOC 2 Compliance

A technical audit by an outside party determines SOC 2 compliance. It requires enterprises to develop and follow specific information security policies and procedures aligned with their goals. SOC 2 compliance can last anywhere from six to twelve months. It ensures that a company's information security safeguards are up to date with the changing needs of cloud data protection.

SOC 2 compliance guarantees your customers and clients that you have the infrastructure, tools, and policies in place to protect their data from illegal access both inside and outside the company.

Essentially, SOC 2 compliance means:

• Your company is familiar with usual operations, routinely monitors for malicious or unidentified behavior, documents system configuration changes, and keeps track of user access levels.
• You have tools to detect risks and notify the appropriate parties, allowing them to assess the situation and take the needed steps to secure data and systems from unauthorized access or usage.
• You will have all the information you need to assess the breadth of any security incidents, remediate systems or processes as needed, and restore data and process integrity.

Conclusion

While no SOC 2 compliance gets required for SaaS and cloud computing providers, its importance in data security cannot be understated. The heavy lifting may be done by a powerful and excellent management tool, saving you time, money, and a few more hours of restful sleep. Consider Werbot in this regard.