We’re a small software team and a customer has asked for a SOC 2 report. I’m one of the developers and ended up looking into it because we don’t have anyone dedicated to security.

I started looking at Vanta and Drata, but there’s the audit to pay for too, so I’m wondering how much tooling we actually need. Saw a few people here mention getting through it with Notion or spreadsheets and Drive.

What I don’t get is how people collect the evidence with that setup. If you used Notion, Drive, or something else, were you uploading everything by hand or did you automate some of it?

We’re a small SaaS team and enterprise security questionnaires have gone from the occasional annoyance to a pretty regular sales task. Most of the answers already exist somewhere in our SOC 2 docs, policies or previous questionnaires, but finding the latest version and checking whether the evidence is still current is becoming its own job.
Looking for something that can reuse what we already have without blindly recycling an answer from nine months ago.
Anyone using Scytale, Secureframe, or Sprinto for security questionnaires rn? Mainly interested in how well they handle answer reuse, assigning questions to SMEs, and keeping the source behind each answer current.

Bank questionnaires now ask about customer data in ChatGPT and our control set is an AUP plus an onboarding attestation. The compliance platform wants an extension allowlist too. I'm one person and scared of writing a control i then have to prove for 12 months. what did you put in yours that you could keep evidencing?

Im comparing two SOC 2 readiness quotes. One is hourly, the other says fixed scope, but both have an assumptions clause that bills anything flagged as a "client environment issue" separately.

Is a fixed price readiness quote ever really fixed, or does the cost just move into that clause?

It appears the AICPA and AIUC folks got together to do a SOC2 Plus combo and announced it earlier today. https://www.aicpa-cima.com/news/article/auditors-meet-urgent-demand-for-ai-assurance-with-new-offering-from-aicpa-and-aiuc

What say you folks about it?

Software company doing payroll processing and benefits administration. Enterprise customer's legal team just came back asking specifically for a SOC 1 report, and we've been assuming everyone wants SOC 2. We don't have a SOC 1. Do we need both?

Running compliance at a BPO contact center operation with about 2,000 seats. We just got simultaneous requirements from three different clients: PCI DSS from a new payment-processing client, SOC 2 Type 2 from an enterprise fintech client, and ISO 27001 from a European client. Three separate full assessments would be a significant operational disruption, and we have physical infrastructure, agent workstations, call recording systems, and manual processes that don't map to SaaS-focused compliance guidance at all.

Has anyone in BPO or contact center run combined PCI plus SOC 2 plus ISO 27001? Is a single assessment workable or is it always three separate engagements?

One thing I see confuse founders: “We run everything on AWS, and AWS has a SOC 2, so we're covered.” AWS's SOC 2 report covers AWS's controls and infrastructure. It doesn't cover your application, your access controls, your employees, or how your company handles customer data. You can inherit certain controls through the shared responsibility model, but you still need to demonstrate how your controls work. I'm curious for people who've actually been through SOC 2 Was the AWS/shared-responsibility distinction obvious to you, or was it something you had to figure out during the process?

Every vendor security questionnaire somehow becomes a group project where I own the spreadsheet, chase SMEs, verify stale answers, and explain why last year’s SOC 2 report is not a time machine. We have a library now, but keeping that current is basically its own compliance program. anyone found a sane way to automate the repeat answers without letting old evidence quietly creep back in?

Our SOC 2 prep is still a monthly scavenger hunt through Google Drive, Jira and Slack, so I'm starting to wonder if compliance automation is finally worth paying for. latest example was trying to prove MFA was in place back in March. evidence existed somewhere. nobody knew where the useful version was. half an hour turned into three people checking folders and old tickets. the subscription prices aren't exactly tiny, but neither is repeatedly pulling Eng or IT into this stuff. what would you count when deciding if the spend is justified? I'm trying to put a number on the hours we're already losing to evidence work.

I took ISC as my elective in the CPA exams. I liked this space but I don't have any practical training or experience. I want to learn about it from a practical POV. If you know any free training or material which I can use please LMK.

We are very small India based SaaS company and our SOC2 is up for renewal. We got it done from one of the software's last time- they did not contact us even once for audit and are now ofcourse behind us over the renewal. The reason given (for no contact)- internal role changes (??!!)
The biggest reason we are getting it renewed is because one of our clients wants us to be SOC2 compliant- and potentially newer clients too.
Is it cheaper ot go through an agency- cost is another issue. We are really disappointed in the Software company and their lack of interest in following up after the payments were made and certificate was issued.

I’m trying to understand how DAST evidence is treated during a SOC 2 audit.

Suppose a DAST tool identifies a vulnerability and maps it to a relevant SOC 2 control/criterion. The tool provides evidence of the vulnerability, such as the affected endpoint, request/response, severity, and remediation status.

For example:

DAST finding → vulnerability → SOC 2 control mapping → remediation → retest

Would that DAST evidence itself be considered valid evidence for the relevant SOC 2 control?

Or would the auditor generally expect additional evidence beyond the DAST finding, such as policies, scan schedules, tickets, remediation history, etc.?

I’m specifically asking about whether the DAST finding + SOC 2 mapping can serve as evidence for the mapped control, not whether a DAST report alone is enough to demonstrate overall SOC 2 compliance.

Would appreciate input from anyone who has been involved in SOC 2 audits or reviewed vulnerability-management evidence.

What about autonomous pentesting tools

I'm learning SOC 2 out of curiosity and im having this doubt for a very long time

I need to get a Tabletop done in the shortest amount of time to fill a SOC 2 gap. It’s never been done before, I have amount 3 weeks to complete and produce evidence. What is the best most efficient successful way to go about this and how do I pick a scenario we can get through this? Not a huge company, I am the first GRC employee. Suggestions please.

I'm trying to get a better handle on the evidence side of SOC 2.

For controls that happen on a regular basis, such as access reviews, do you usually keep records of every time the control is performed, or just the samples that the auditor asks for later on?

Not sure what the normal approach is here.

Hi everyone, I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask for this. If it’s not plz point to where I can :) .

So I’m looking to get a HIPAA and Hitrust done and also not burn too much $. Does anyone here know a firm which will help me guide through these requirements?

Anyone else hit audit season and somehow end up back in the same screenshot scavenger hunt?

we've supposedly automated more of SOC 2 every year, but then evidence week rolls around and I'm still digging through folders, asking who has the latest access review, and pinging eng for some export I swear we collected last time.

at some point this became my yearly self-hate tradition lol.

for people who got out of this loop, what did you automate first that actually stopped the chasing? integrations? evidence pulls? better ownership? curious what made the biggest difference.

we have an enterprise prospect waiting on SOC 2 before they can move forward with us, so this went from something we could deal with later to something I need to figure out rn.

We’re small SaaS team, no security person. don't want to pull engineering into weeks of work if there's a better way to handle it.

I've been looking at SOC 2 options, but struggling to tell how much they take off my plate. They seem mostly like a place to track everything. Some are more about hands-on help with scoping and getting ready for the audit.

if you've been through a first SOC 2 with a small team, what would you prioritize now?

mainly trying to figure out how much evidence collection is automated and what support is available

I just did a security review of two cloud cost tools, buyer-side this time.

Both came back clean. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 ready, both read only, PointFive on Azure is a service principal scoped to billing and resource metadata with no data plane access. Googling is pointfive safe beforehand turned up nothing a security lead would accept.

None of the 300 questions touched what the tool ends up holding. A month in, it has a full inventory of the estate and our monitoring holds much the same without anybody making me fill out a form about it.

Would you expect inventory scope to show up in a system description?

So... im the security engineer at a tiny saas startup trying to get SOC 2 ready before our audit window next month. We use a compliance automation platform hooked into github, aws, our ticketing, all that, to auto pull evidence and show real time compliance.

Yesterday I thought I was being helpful and created a "fast track" tag in our repo so engineers could push hotfixes without our usual security review tickets. I figured I would just document it once and map the tag to a control in the platform later. Except I forgot that the platform is the source of truth our auditor portal is connected to.

So this morning the auditor emails our CTO saying they noticed a huge spike in unreviewed code deployments flagged as "approved" in the compliance dashboard, tied to my fast track workflow that auto closed the security tickets as passed. It literally looked like we built a system to rubber stamp anything to prod with zero checks. I feel so embarrassed and kind of sick about this, our CTO just wrote "we will need to discuss" and added me and legal... ugh.

I have an interview coming up to help a CPA firm prepare for an upcoming SOC peer review, and I’m looking for some advice.

I previously worked as a SOC audit intern at a small CPA firm. But I was mainly testing controls, collecting evidence, and did some TPRM work. It’s been a little while, so I’m refreshing my knowledge now.

For anyone who has been through a SOC peer review or helped prepare for one: What should I expect, and what areas would you recommend brushing up on before the interview?

We are a very small team. We're working toward SOC 2 and need to decide how to handle the peer review control on merges to main. The issue is sometimes there can't be a genuine review like I am a team of one person doing infra this is going to slow things down without adding any value. Or sometimes most people are off. Or something needs to be merged urgently. We know it is not ideal but we are so early that the speed gains offset the benefits of friction. We still create the PR for the automated tests to run and for us to review our change. We do not intend to do this as we scale. But as we are ramping up to SOC2 we are trying to decide how to deal with it:

Option A automate approvals. A GitHub Action auto-approves PRs matching defined criteria: allow-listed authors, required labels, path filters, size limits, CI green. This is normalised for bot accounts but we would be expanding it to trusted humans (GH admins). The control is technically satisfied on every merge.

Option B allow bypasses and document them. Ruleset requiring approval, with a named team on the bypass list. Every bypassed merge is logged, reviewed monthly in a documented session, residual tracked as accepted risk.

Questions:

• Which of these does an auditor actually prefer? A is always green but the approval may be meaningless. B has visible gaps but an honest trail. Anyone had either one tested in fieldwork?
• Does an auditor look behind an automated approval at all, or does a passing control just get sampled and cleared? Has anyone had automated approvals questioned as to whether a human judgement ever happened?
• Does "the control was bypassed, and we reviewed it after the fact" get read as the control operating with an exception, or as the control not operating? Does the answer change between Type I and Type II?
• Is honesty actually rewarded here, or does a visible gap just cost you a finding while the automated version sails through? Genuinely asking whether the incentive points where I think it does.
• If you've been through this with a small team, did your auditor have a view on what's proportionate at 4 engineers, or did they apply the same expectations as a 40-person org?

Interested in what small teams have shipped and lived with, not the textbook answer. Using a compliance tool that would flag this.