If you’re looking for a SOC 2 assessment tool and want to get the most value from your assessment process, make sure to download the white paper at the bottom.
What is SOC 2
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) produces three reports, known as System and Organization Controls (SOC), during their audit of service organizations. One of these, the SOC 2, is specifically designed to validate the Trust Services Criteria of service organizations. Essentially, SOC 2 compliance ensures that the service organization adheres to certain controls around the security of the systems that the organizations use to process user data. SOC 2 also attempts to keep that user data confidential within the systems that process it.
Why Use the SOC 2 Framework?
Five key categories within SOC 2, known as “Trust Service Principles,” establish guidelines for security, availability, confidentiality, processing inquiry and privacy. The main difference between SOC 2 compliance and other industry standards is that the organization is actually the party that defines the controls to which they must adhere—it is the role of the auditor to ensure that the company is in compliance with the controls they themselves set forth.
How to Conduct a SOC 2 Assessment
This nuance of SOC 2 compliance can make assessments challenging, especially when internal teams and consultants are tasked with conducting a test run prior to an official audit. While many of the controls are documented in PDF files, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, not having a single, centralized repository of both the control and compliance toward it can create a paperwork nightmare. Here, having a centralized SOC 2 assessment tool can come in handy, and this is why many professionals and consultants turn to SecurityGate.io.
Simplify the Assessment Process with SecurityGate.io
SecurityGate.io’s cloud-based platform-as-a-service ensures that all the assessment questions and workflows are saved in a centralized location. And with our workflow tool, consultants can build out different steps and processes to validate the SOC 2 controls that their clients have put in place. This means that throughout a company’s lifecycle, those same controls will be assessed in a consistent manner without staff having to hunt for a physical binder containing all the information or worrying that a computer file might be out of date.
After all the controls have been documented in our tool and workflows have been created, the consultant and organization are left with a SOC 2 assessment tool that is intuitive and easy to implement. In fact, assessments performed with SecurityGate.io often allow the assessment timeline to shrink from weeks to days. And when an assessment is completed, the results are instantaneous—organizations can see exactly where they are out of compliance and the consultant can get to work helping them remediate issues right away.
Ready to Get Started?
Companies using SecurityGate.io are provided with a simple, easy-to-consume historical record of how the company has performed over time. This empowers the consultant to identify trends and challenges to better equip their client for the future.
If you’re a consultant who helps service organizations stay in compliance with their SOC 2 controls and you’re looking to ditch the spreadsheet for a dynamic modern platform, take a look at how SecurityGate.io can simplify your assessment process in this 3-minute demo or contact our team today.
