SOC 2 Compliance Requirements – All You Need To Know

SOC 2 compliance is a paradox. On paper, it is a tangible stamp of approval that reassures customers; in practice, however, it is often a rushed, last-minute scramble, with security teams juggling auditors, documentation, and control mappings rather than focusing on risk reduction. This creates systems and infrastructures that are SOC 2 compliant but provide little resilience against real-world threats.

A key reason for this gap is pentesting, or rather, the business’s commitment to its traditional approach. Since SOC 2 doesn’t explicitly require it, many companies delay security testing until the audit, treating it as an afterthought rather than an ongoing necessity. Nevertheless, patching leaks after the storm has hit means vulnerabilities may have already been exploited, and compliance alone won’t prevent a breach.

Thus, this article breaks down the core requirements of SOC 2 compliance, explaining how each control maps to real-world security risks and where pentesting plays a critical role in closing compliance gaps.

What Are SOC 2 Compliance Requirements?

SOC 2 compliance requirements refer to the criteria put forward by AICPA (Association of International Certified Professional Accountants). These criteria have to be met by all companies looking to attain SOC2 compliance certification and pass an audit from an independent auditor.

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: 

1. Security: SOC 2 security requirements protect data systems from any system damages, unauthorized access, and disclosure of information that could tamper with the other SOC2 trust services or your company’s ability to meet its compliance objectives.  
2. Privacy: These principles help ensure PII is collected, processed, stored, and disposed of responsibly, requiring consent controls, minimal data collection, encryption, and compliance with frameworks like GDPR and CCPA.
3. Confidentiality: This set of requirements helps safeguard business-critical data like IP, trade secrets, and contracts through encryption ( such as AES 256), strict access controls, NDAs, and regular SOC2 audits.
4. Processing Integrity: Organizations must implement validation checks, error detection, and monitoring to prevent unauthorized data changes and ensure error-free, timely transactions, which are critical for regulated industries like finance and healthcare.
5. Availability: Such requirements help mitigate financial, reputational, and operational risks by ensuring system uptime, resilience, and business continuity through redundancy, failover, DDoS protection, and SLAs.

What Are SOC 2 Requirements?

As mentioned, the SOC 2 compliance requirements are categorized based on the five different trust service criteria (TSC). Let’s take a look at them.

1. Security Requirements

The security criteria are called common criteria since a lot of them overlap with the other Trust Services Criteria for evaluating systems. The first 5 SOC 2 criteria are mandatory while the rest are optional.  

CC1 Series – Control Environment

These requirements assess your company’s control environment. It checks for accountability, staff training, and more. How your company shows its commitment to ethical values, development, and retention of good team members, as well as the demonstration of an accountable culture, are assessed and evaluated. Your company’s leadership and clear structuring of responsibilities and reporting are also assessed. 

CC2 Series – Communication and Data

These security requirements check how well your company demonstrates the proper data management measures to check how they are collected and shared. Using relevant data to support IC and clearly communicating controls and objectives with external parties are some controls mentioned in this series of requirements. 

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. 

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 in them. It also determines and evaluates your company’s reporting processes. 

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 checks for adequate development of risk mitigation controls and other tech controls based on pre-defined policies to meet SOC 2 objectives.   

CC6: Controls over Logical and Physical Access in SOC 2

Strong access controls are the foundation of SOC 2 compliance. CC6 evaluates how your organization manages data access, ensuring only authorized users can handle, modify, or delete sensitive information, including RBAC, MFA, and physical security to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches.

CC7: Systems and Operational Controls for SOC 2

A robust security posture isn’t just about prevention but also about response. As such, CC7 focuses on your ability to detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents by assessing anomaly detection and incident response plans to ensure operational resilience and minimize downtime.

CC8: Controls for SOC 2 Change Management

CC8 examines how your organization handles system updates, policy changes, and infrastructure shifts. Effective change management ensures updates are tested, approved, and securely implemented without disrupting security or compliance.

CC9: SOC 2 Risk Mitigation Controls 

This criterion evaluates how well your organization identifies, assesses, and mitigates risks across internal operations, vendors, and partners using proactive risk assessments, security reviews, contractual safeguards, and continuous monitoring.

2. Privacy Requirements

SOC 2 privacy requirements are guidelines placed to help protect any PII or personally identifiable information from unauthorized access or any 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. Ensuring client understanding of how and why your company stores their data. 
2. Communicate the choices parties have 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 the use, retention, and proper disposal of PII, such as using data encryption, MFA, and access controls. 
5. The PII stored by your application or business should allow customers access to their PII for any corrections, updates, and reviews. 
6. Ensure your company has proper PII breach or disclosure notification policies that cover essentials of post-breach communication with clients. 
7. Ensure your company’s data storage is current, accurate, and up-to-date in terms of security to ensure the integrity of the stored PII. 
8. Ensure the effectiveness of your company’s response processes for any PII-related queries, including its monitoring.

3. Confidentiality Requirements

Confidentiality requirements under SOC2 help guard any data deemed confidential by your company. 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 they match 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. 

How Can Astra Security Help?

Astra simplifies SOC 2 compliance pentesting by combining AI-powered automation with expert manual testing to uncover security risks, including business logic flaws and payment escalation issues. With 13,000+ test cases and continuous threat exposure management, we help organizations proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities.

Our seamless integrations with Slack, Jira, GitHub, and Jenkins embed security into development workflows, ensuring real-time insights and zero false positives. Our custom reports for management and developers streamline compliance, while unlimited automated scans keep security teams ahead of emerging threats.

Beyond testing, our team provides publicly verifiable certifications and two free rescans, reinforcing SOC 2 compliance efforts. Our CXO-friendly dashboard and dedicated security experts simplify reporting, while our active contributions to OWASP ensure cutting-edge security measures that align with multiple compliance frameworks.

Our VAPT offerings help with: 

1. Maintenance of compliance with regulatory requirements like SOC2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and GDPR. 
2. Better security coverage for web and mobile applications, cloud infrastructure, networks, and APIs.  
3. Detection and remediation of vulnerabilities and security gaps of varying criticality. 
4. Shifting from DevOps to DevSecOps giving due priority to security testing applications in SDLC.

Final Thoughts

SOC 2 compliance has become the baseline expectation for any company handling sensitive data. It demonstrates to customers and partners that security and privacy are embedded in your operations, strengthening credibility and competitive advantage.

As such, achieving compliance demands fundamental security measures that hold up under scrutiny of an audit that highlights gaps and includes continuous pentesting as well as SOC2 risk assessments to keep your systems resilient.

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