POV: an important prospect requires all of their partners to get a SOC 2 audit. You’ve just met with your auditing firm and you’ve been tasked with evidence collection, which sounds like tracking down a lot of people and documents. No one can tell you when the RFP knowledge base was last updated. The sales team is asking how long it will take, and can it go faster?
You sit back and wonder the same thing: is it possible, and if so, how?
3 ways to prepare for a SOC 2 audit
There are a few different approaches organizations can take when pursuing a SOC 2 report: doing it independently, hiring a consultant, or using a compliance automation platform.
Doing it independently requires that someone at your company must have the expertise and bandwidth to lead the process themselves.
Hiring a consultant gives you the benefit of accessing their expertise, with less burden on your own team. But, as your compliance needs grow, you may want to bring more GRC capabilities in-house and create a scalable system.
Using a compliance automation platform can greatly reduce manual efforts and the potential for human error. It’s also continuous and scalable, making it ideal for businesses as they grow.
From tedious to time-saving
SOC 2 compliance automation refers to the use of software tools and technologies to automate and streamline the processes involved in achieving and maintaining SOC 2 compliance. It’s also the first step towards programmatic trust assurance.
Compliance automation software makes your organization more efficient by giving you access to:
Integrations
How it works is that the compliance automation software would integrate with your company’s internal environment, empowering all the various applications, databases, and systems to work with one another. Integrating your tech stack can automatically map policies and controls across multiple frameworks, run tests, and create a comprehensive digest for auditors and colleagues who need visibility into your security posture. Additionally, integrations can enable faster evidence collection and task management. We go more into detail about how these compliance automation benefits work, and you can read about them here.
Check out the list of integrations driving our automation efforts and helping speed up the evidence collection process.
If you couldn’t tell, integration plays a critical role for time savings and continuous monitoring.
Continuous monitoring
In the past, compliance was typically demonstrated through periodic point-in-time monitoring, which involves repeatedly collecting static data or screenshots that are out of date as soon as they’re collected. However, with compliance automation, it’s now possible to conduct continuous monitoring of your information security system in real-time.
Continuous monitoring gives you, auditors, and potential customers confidence that your system is working effectively at this very moment, as well as the ability to address issues as soon as they’re detected. With continuous monitoring, you’ll always be able to ensure that your security measures remain effective and up-to-date.
A risk register
An effective SOC 2 compliance platform should include a risk register (SOC 2 requires one!). With a risk register, you can easily create a customized risk assessment that is tailored to your specific business needs and compliance requirements, ensuring that you are accurately identifying and mitigating potential risks.
When it’s time for your annual SOC 2 assessment, you won’t have to struggle with manual spreadsheets, emails, or dusty documents because you’ll already have thorough documentation.
A gap analysis
This is the process of identifying the differences between the current state of a business’s operations and the desired state to meet a particular standard or compliance goal.
For SOC 2 compliance, a gap analysis is used to identify any areas of non-compliance with the SOC 2 framework and develop a remediation plan to address the gaps and achieve compliance. It gives you a holistic view of your overall readiness by looking closely at your controls, policies, and evidence and giving you a progress report on how far along you are, and how much farther you need to go in order to satisfy the standard requirements.
A gap analysis can also be used to see how much additional work is required to meet additional framework requirements like ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR and more.
A network of partners
SOC 2 compliance automation can be more than just a tool for simplifying compliance efforts. It can also connect you to a network of partners that you’ll need to work with on your compliance journey, like accredited audit firms, penetration testing, device and identity access management, to name a few. It’s often faster and less expensive to work with a pre-vetted partner.
Compliance automation is a great starting point, but the real magic happens when you go beyond it
And that’s where TrustCloud comes in. We provide all the benefits of compliance automation, but we take it a step further and elevate it to programmatic trust assurance. Many compliance automation tools tend to focus on just the end result – receiving a standard – and their whole selling point is speed. We guarantee timeliness too, as well as helping you to build a secure, future-proof program.
Want more info on SOC 2 compliance automation?
From Compliance Automation to a Trust Assurance Platform – we talk about automated evidence collection, task management, and how compliance automation software maps policies and tests controls across multiple frameworks.
A Step-By-Step Guide on Creating a Risk Register – because if you’re pursuing SOC 2, you’ll need one of these. We also include a downloadable template to get you started.
Introduction to SOC 2: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need – we cover the different types, cost, timeline, audit prep, and auditor insight.
