SOC 2 Compliance Requirements: A Complete Guide (2024)

The value of solid, foolproof security can never be overstated. Your business’s data is always a prime target for malicious hackers, and your business’ growth depends on good security.

The current digital landscape necessitates invaluable attention to security for any business with an online presence, resulting in the need for security compliance. System and Organization Controls Type 2, or SOC2, is a popular, globally recognized compliance standard. 

For a SOC 2 certificate to be issued, your business must meet specific criteria known as trust services requirements.  

What Are SOC 2 Compliance Requirements?

SOC 2 compliance requirements refer to the criteria put forward by the AICPA (Association of International Certified Professional Accountants). All companies seeking SOC2 compliance certification must meet these criteria and pass an independent audit.

If you’re a company within the healthcare or finance sector or a SaaS vendor, having SOC2 compliance adds remarkable value to your company’s services and security. Similarly, other businesses include data centers, cloud platform providers, and, ultimately, any company that places importance on cybersecurity. 

The AICPA categorizes these requirements into five categories, known as the Trust Services Criteria. It includes security, privacy, confidentiality, processing integrity, and availability. 

What Are SOC 2 Requirements? – SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria/AICPA Focus Areas

As mentioned, the SOC 2 compliance requirements are categorized based on five different trust services criteria (TSC). Let’s examine them.

1. Security Requirements

The security requirements set forth by SOC2 standards overlap with those required by other compliance regulations. The first 5 SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria are mandatory, while the rest are optional.  

a. CC1 Series – Control Environment

These requirements assess your company’s control environment. They check for accountability, staff training, and more. They also assess and evaluate how your company is committed to ethical values, develops and retains good team members, and demonstrates an accountable culture. Your company’s leadership and clear structuring of responsibilities and reporting are also assessed. 

b. CC2 Series – Communication and Data

These security requirements check how well your company demonstrates suitable data management measures to monitor data collection and sharing. Some controls mentioned in this series of requirements use relevant data to support IC and communicate controls and objectives with external parties. 

c. CC3 Series – Risk Assessment

This set of requirements assesses whether your business follows the current and relevant risk assessment techniques. It mainly focuses on technical vulnerabilities and financial flaws. 

The risk assessment controls require your business to have a clear scope that allows regular risk assessments, such as vulnerability assessments or penetration tests. 

It also requires you to show the identification and analysis of all business risks that could damper your business and SOC 2 compliance objectives. Such identification and assessment of risks should also be done if and when there are significant changes within your assets. 

d. CC4: Monitoring of Controls 

This set of criteria focuses on your company’s compliance monitoring capacities, such as regular evaluations of internal policies and accurate communication of identified deficiencies. It also determines and evaluates your company’s reporting processes. 

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e. CC5: Design and Implementation of Controls

Your company’s effectiveness in executing compliance initiatives is checked to ensure it can adopt various compliance measures into different tech stacks within the organization. It also checks for adequate development of risk mitigation controls and other tech controls based on pre-defined policies to meet SOC 2 objectives.   

f. CC6: Controls over Logical and Physical Access in SOC 2

The requirements in CC6 relate to your company’s compliance measures and security capacities regarding data access, handling, and deletion practices. 

g. CC7: Systems and Operational Controls for SOC 2

The correct systems and operational controls are essential in achieving SOC 2 compliance. CC7 primarily focuses on your company’s incident response plans and capacities. 

h. CC8: Controls for SOC 2 Change Management

This assesses how your company navigates through changes in management and policy shifts and what processes are implemented. 

i. CC9: SOC 2 Risk Mitigation Controls 

SOC2 assessments involve checking the measures your company has in place to identify and mitigate risks. This includes internal risks and vendor, third-party, and partner risks. 

2. Privacy Requirements

SOC 2 privacy requirements are guidelines that help protect PII or personally identifiable information from unauthorized access or security breaches within your company. 

It is important to note that privacy only applies to personal data, whereas confidentiality applies to sensitive information. SOC2 has eight privacy requirements that check various aspects of personal data security. 

1. Assessing client understanding of how and why your company stores their data. 
2. Communicate parties’ choices over their data to establish proper personal data authority.
3. Ensure your company’s PII collection processes match its stated aims. 
4. Ensure your company has proper safeguards for using, retaining, and disposing of PII, such as data encryption, MFA, and access controls. 
5. Your application or business should store PII and allow customers to access it for corrections, updations, and reviews. 
6. Ensure your company has proper PII breach or disclosure notification policies that cover the essentials of post-breach communication with clients. 
7. To ensure the integrity of the stored PII, ensure that your company’s data storage is current, accurate, and secure. 
8. Ensure the effectiveness of your company’s response processes for any PII-related queries, including monitoring them.

3. Confidentiality Requirements

Confidentiality requirements under SOC2 help guard any data that your company deems confidential. This is mainly done by limiting access to only a section of authorized personnel.

Major controls mentioned under confidentiality requirements include: 

1. Identification and maintenance of confidential information by your company to prevent its compromise. 
2. Having proper processes for the disposal of confidential information to meet your company’s SOC2 confidentiality objectives.

4. Processing Integrity Requirements

This set of requirements is used to evaluate your cloud environment, data processing, and storage to see if it matches the needs of your business. This series of SOC 2 compliance requirements mainly concerns how data is managed and not the data or its security. It comprises five criteria:

1. The efficacy with which your company understands its data processing goals from data metrics to company goals. 
2. Placing policies and procedures for system inputs that improve accuracy and meet company aims.
3. Maintaining data processing quality by placing effective measures and policies. 
4. Placing policies and procedures to allow data output for internal or external demands. 
5. Maintaining adequate data storage systems with policies and procedures that cover the company’s specifications.

5. Availability Requirements

This refers to how accessible the information stored and the services provided by your company are. The SOC 2 compliance requirements for availability essentially help data accessibility through monitoring and maintenance. The controls mentioned under this trust services criteria include: 

1. Ensuring your company’s technical capacities allows it to meet your business objectives and monitor and manage processing. 
2. Address how your company would recover from disruption by having proper data backup processes and recovery measures. 
3. Test out your company’s recovery plan and its real-world viability. 

SOC 2 Report Types

There are mainly two types of SOC 2 reports:

• Type 1 reports evaluate an organization’s design controls at a specific time.
• Type 2 reports assess the controls’ design and operating effectiveness over a period of time, typically six months or more.

Type 1 & Type 2 Requirements

Type 1

• System description: SOC 2 requires a detailed description of all the systems and processes followed by the company. 
• Control design: Evaluating if the organization’s controls have been suitably designed to meet the applicable Trust Services Criteria.

Type 2

• Design and operating effectiveness: This refers to how well controls work over a certain amount of time.
• Evidence of compliance: Proof and documentation demonstrating adherence to the SOC 2 requirements.

Key Differences

• Scope: Type 1’s scope is design, whereas Type 2’s includes design and operability.
• Timeframe: Type 2 is over some time, whereas Type 1 is point-in-time.

Type 2 offers greater confidence, showing that controls are well-designed and function as intended.

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Astra Security’s round-the-clock vulnerability assessment and SOC2 penetration testing assess your company’s assets as quickly and efficiently as possible to detect vulnerabilities that require mitigation. 

Astra provides risk assessments, such as automated and manual vulnerability scans, assessments, and comprehensive pentests. Astra also provides SOC 2-specific penetration testing to help you identify which vulnerabilities are hindering your assets’ SOC2 compliance. 

Our VAPT offerings help maintain compliance with regulatory requirements like SOC2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and GDPR. We offer better security coverage for web and mobile applications, cloud infrastructure, networks, and APIs.  

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Final Thoughts

Given the rise in data breaches in today’s digital environment, SOC 2 compliance is essential. It allows businesses to show their customers how committed they are to data security and privacy. 

SOC 2 compliance is based on the five trust services criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Fulfilling these objectives can help an organization satisfy legal obligations, improve its reputation, and lower the risk of data breaches. 

Organizations can use SOC 2 penetration testing services to improve their security posture, safeguard their information, reduce hazards, find vulnerabilities, and make suggested changes to achieve compliance. 

Astra Pentest is built by the team of experts that helped secure Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, and Buffer

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