More and more businesses increasingly rely on third-party external service providers to conduct essential business functions. In light of this, protecting the confidentiality, availability, processing integrity, security, and data privacy is crucial. This is where the System and Organizations Control 2 (SOC 2) compliance framework comes in.
While complying with the SOC 2 standards can indicate your company’s conscious efforts toward data risk management and securing information assets, gaining your company the trust of your customers and certifying to its security guidelines may pose a big challenge. This is because SOC 2 audits are generally expensive and time-consuming.
So, after spending months getting SOC 2 ready, how do you know if your audit prep is good enough? Through a SOC 2 readiness assessment, of course.
To uncover gaps and inadequacies in an organization’s compliance with SOC 2 requirements, you can conduct SOC 2 readiness assessments as preventative measures by reviewing your policies, procedures, and controls. These evaluations are thorough, including vendor management, risk management, data management, and access restrictions. Organizations can utilize the insights obtained from a SOC 2 readiness assessment to proactively improve their data security posture and address vulnerabilities. This can go a long way toward preparing the company for SOC 2 certification.
This blog will provide a brief overview of SOC 2 readiness assessments, including what they are, why they are important, what they include, and how much they may cost.
What is a SOC 2 Readiness Assessment?
A SOC 2 Readiness Assessment is an audit evaluation examining how securely an organization maintains its data processing systems. Before the final audit, this evaluation finds the gaps, inadequacies, and lapses in your organization’s policies, procedures, and deficiencies.
A SOC 2 compliance certification can help your business expand and close bigger contracts with high-value customers. However, adhering to all SOC 2 requirements and ensuring your organization has a solid and secure data infrastructure at any given moment requires much effort. Conducting a SOC 2 readiness assessment is an efficient technique to ensure all the steps have been taken towards compliance with the SOC 2 guidelines and that any vulnerabilities are remedied in time for the SOC 2 audit.
In short, a SOC 2 readiness assessment acts like a trial run for your SOC 2 audit. It helps you answer some important questions, such as if your organization is ready for SOC 2 certification, if your current controls are good enough to prove compliance if there are any gaps you need to fix before your SOC 2 examination, and if there are, how you can remediate them.
So, what benefits do you get from a SOC 2 readiness assessment? Let’s find out.
Why Should You Conduct a SOC 2 Readiness Assessment?
Besides identifying vulnerabilities in your data infrastructure and implementing policies, procedures, and controls to fix them, a SOC 2 readiness assessment also has other benefits. These include the following:
Reduce Possibilities for Error and Oversight
Your security compliance is thoroughly reviewed in the SOC 2 readiness assessment. It is, therefore, the best method to ensure you have met all the standards for SOC 2 compliance.
In addition, the evaluations lessen the possibility of mistakes and oversights when you eventually do your SOC 2 audit because they identify the flaws and gaps and offer recommendations on how to address them. Recommendations can include creating organizational charts or having the leadership team frequently evaluate and approve your vendor assessments.
Better Prepare for Your SOC 2 Audit
Since readiness assessment functions as a pre-trial for your SOC 2 audit, it makes you aware of the questions and observations that may be brought up during the audit. Thus, a SOC 2 readiness assessment also helps you better prepare yourself by gathering evidence, paperwork, rules, and procedures and outlining your control objectives matrix, to mention a few, for your final SOC 2 audit.
Generally speaking, it will prepare you to show an auditor you comply. In a nutshell, it helps improve your security posture for your SOC 2 audit.
Increase Your Chances For a Successful SOC 2 Audit
The end goal of a SOC 2 readiness assessment is to facilitate a smooth and effective SOC 2 audit that gets you a SOC 2 report to demonstrate to your customers that your organization takes data security seriously.
This makes it essential for companies looking to get SOC 2 certified to conduct this evaluation to improve their chances of receiving a SOC 2 certification from a qualified auditor. Suppose your SOC 2 report has an unqualified opinion. In that case, it indicates that your auditor found no problems during the audit, i.e., all control tests were properly planned (Type 1 report) and executed (Type 2 report).
What Does a SOC 2 Readiness Assessment Include?
Your SOC 2 readiness evaluation will typically consist of the two steps listed below:
- Review Policies, Controls, and Documentation
This involves the consultant checking your mapping of the selected TSC to internal controls and then assessing the scope of your audit. Specific standards and criteria are associated with each Trust Services Criteria, and the evaluation will examine in detail how well your SOC 2 controls are mapped to each requirement.
So, what policies, controls, and documentation fall under this category?
Policies for vendor management, password management, access control, and more are included here. Establishing security policies and procedures for how staff members, outside contractors, and other parties engage with your company is a requirement of SOC 2. In addition to this, evidence and proof that you correctly adhere to security controls and procedures are typically included in the documentation. These can be test results, virtual tool data, infrastructure data, and more, all found in documents. Having these documents ready for your auditor will make the auditing process faster.
- Create a Detailed Remediation Plan
Your SOC 2 readiness evaluation will further identify any operational oversights, control design flaws, and missing links about the SOC 2 compliance standards. You may run penetration tests, risk assessments, and vulnerability scans with it. It enables you to draft plans for risk remediation for the identified hazards.
Usually, the outside consultant would propose remediation strategies to address the errors and oversights and suggestions for improvement areas.
Following their assessment, your consultant may also recommend process redesign, the introduction of security awareness training programs, and enhanced evidence gathering. Generally speaking, the consultant would write a report to management outlining their findings, suggestions, and assessments regarding your SOC 2 readiness.
How Much Does a SOC 2 Readiness Assessment Cost?
The average cost of a professional SOC 2 readiness evaluation varies on several factors, including the size, complexity, and scope of your organization’s controls, as well as the selected auditor if an external party is doing it.
Your auditor will review your business’s services while doing your readiness assessment. They will pinpoint the controls enabling you to fulfill the applicable TSC. Following the readiness assessment, they will send a report outlining their conclusions.
SOC 2 Compliance with Akitra!
Establishing trust is a crucial competitive differentiator when courting new SaaS businesses in today’s era of data breaches and compromised privacy. Customers and partners want assurances that their organizations are doing everything possible to prevent disclosing sensitive data and putting them at risk, and compliance certification fills that need.
Akitra offers an industry-leading, AI-powered Compliance Automation platform for SaaS companies. Akitra, with its expertise in technology solutions and compliance, is well-positioned to assist companies in navigating the complexities of compliance frameworks and provide invaluable guidance in implementing the necessary framework requirements and processes.
Using automated evidence collection and continuous monitoring, together with a full suite of customizable policies and controls as a compliance foundation, our compliance automation platform and services help our customers become compliance-ready for NIST’s 800-218 Secure Software Development Framework and other security standards, such as SOC 1, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, ISO 9001, ISO 13485, NIST CSF, NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP, CCPA, CMMC, SOX ITGC, and more such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, Australian ISM and Essential Eight etc. In addition, companies can use Akitra’s Risk Management product for overall risk management using quantitative methodologies such as Factorial Analysis of Information Risks (FAIR) and qualitative methods, including NIST-based for your company, Vulnerability Assessment and Pen Testing services, Trust Center, and AI-based Automated Questionnaire Response product to streamline and expedite security questionnaire response processes, delivering huge cost savings. Our compliance and security experts also provide customized guidance to navigate the end-to-end compliance process confidently. Last but not least, we have also developed a resource hub called Akitra Academy which provides easy-to-learn short video courses on security, compliance, and related topics of immense significance for today’s fast-growing companies.
The benefits of our solution include enormous savings in time, human resources, and cost savings, including discounted audit fees with our audit firm partners. Customers can achieve compliance certification fast and cost-effectively, stay continuously compliant as they grow, and become certified under additional frameworks from our single compliance automation platform.
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