SOC 2 Compliance Automation: Everything You Need to Know
Year over year, the number of security breaches have been on the rise. In fact, a report from IBM found that 83% of surveyed organizations experienced a data breach in 2022, often leading to damaged reputations and increases in price passed down to customers.
All businesses want to be secure. In response to the threat landscape, many companies employ System and Organization Controls (SOC) reports before procuring vendors’ services. One of the most common SOC reports for information security is a SOC 2 report. SOC 2 is a compliance framework created by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that leverages what are known as the trust services criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Every SOC 2 report includes the required security category while other trust services criteria may be added as appropriate. SOC 2 is one of the most widely recognized standards in the U.S. and provides assurance over an organization's security controls, ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect customer data.
As with many compliance reports, achieving a SOC 2 report can be both time-consuming and costly for an organization. That’s where automation comes in handy. By leveraging automation tools and technologies, organizations can significantly reduce the burden of manual tasks and ensure adherence to compliance requirements.
Understanding SOC 2 Compliance Automation
In the context of SOC 2 compliance, automation refers to using technology to simplify the method and process to achieve and maintain compliance. When working towards SOC 2 compliance, organizations can choose a manual process or automated process.
Achieving SOC 2 compliance manually is a more traditional approach. With this traditional approach to compliance, various audit tasks such as control implementation, monitoring, and documentation are performed manually. This often involves spreadsheets and checklists to track controls and their effectiveness. On the other hand, automated SOC 2 compliance involves leveraging a security automation tool to streamline the SOC 2 process. This approach relies on platforms to automate the aforementioned audit tasks.
Take a look at some of the key benefits of automating SOC 2 compliance:
Efficiency: Automation tools take care of routine and repetitive compliance tasks, which can be extremely time consuming when done manually. Automation reduces the likelihood of human error and ensures consistency in compliance activities, leading to improved accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, when security and compliance professionals spend less time on repetitive tasks, they can instead redirect their time towards more strategic activities and improving the organization’s overall security posture.
Real-Time Monitoring: Automation allows for continuous, real-time monitoring of security controls and processes, making it easier to detect and respond to potential threats and giving organizations significantly more visibility than manual compliance checks.
Scalability: Automation enables scalability by efficiently managing compliance requirements across multiple systems and environments without significant manual effort. With compliance requirements and security regulations being updated frequently, this flexibility is invaluable for many organizations.
Overall, using automation to streamline the SOC 2 process increases efficiency, accuracy, scalability, and real-time monitoring capabilities compared to manual processes. It helps organizations effectively manage their compliance obligations, reduce risk, and demonstrate a strong commitment to data security and privacy.
Exploring Automation Opportunities in SOC 2 Compliance
There are multiple processes that can be automated on the journey to achieving SOC 2 compliance. Take a look:
Risk Assessment: Automation streamlines risk assessments by automating data collection, analysis, and risk scoring. Automation tools can also help identify and prioritize risks, calculate risk scores, and identify any gaps during the readiness assessment to be remediated prior to the audit.
Policy Management: Automation tools can simplify policy management by providing a centralized platform to create, distribute, track, and update policies. They can ensure that employees receive and acknowledge policies, and track compliance with policy requirements.
Control Implementation and Monitoring: With continuous, real-time monitoring of controls, automation platforms can ensure security controls are implemented and functioning correctly, providing an organization with great visibility in the event of an issue or threat.
Incident Management: Automation can be valuable in the event of a security incident, particular for incident detection, response, and reporting.
Reporting: Automation tools can help generate reports aligned with SOC 2 requirements that can be used by auditors during the SOC 2 audit, saving significant time.
Best Practices for SOC 2 Compliance Automation
When selecting a SOC 2 automation tool, there’s a number of platforms in the market to choose from. Here’s a few tips for select the right tool for your organization:
Research: Taking the first step often means conducting a search on individual platforms. Look at reviews for different tools, and scope out the difference in platforms. Putting in the time to research what each tool offers will help you get what you need and the best tool for you and your clients. The right automation tool should integrate easily within your existing security and compliance processes.
Scope out what you don’t need: Along with studying up on your options, it’s important to figure out what you don’t need. Automation platforms differ from industry to industry, and there are a great deal of options available. By minimizing what tools don’t fit your needs first, you can narrow your scope to what will benefit your organization the most.
Have a manual plan in place: While automation has many benefits, it’s important to have backup. As we’ve seen in the past few years, unexpected events like COVID or natural disasters can occur, making your data more vulnerable. No matter what platform you end up choosing, consider maintaining a manual plan as a backup to the backup—something to ensure your processes are always in place.
Once you’ve selected your automation tool, it’s important that your team has continuous training and support to ensure your organization is getting the most out of the automation platform. It may be helpful to designate one or more people as internal experts who “own” the internal use of the tool.
Overall, compliance automation can streamline and optimize the SOC 2 process. Ready to begin your journey to SOC 2 compliance? Book a demo today to learn how Audora bridges gaps to create a more streamlined experience for both auditors and auditees.
