Organizations that want to prove to others – and to themselves – that they have a solid cybersecurity and data privacy program will undergo a SOC 2 audit. As such, a SOC 2 audit is a big deal, and it’s demanding, and it requires some serious preparation.
SOC audits were created by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) under several evaluation and reporting frameworks comprising the System and Organization Controls headers SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3.Although each of those holds value, many organizations ask their vendors and business partners – and are themselves asked – specifically to provide the results of a SOC 2 Type 2 audit. For that type, auditors evaluate organizations against the SOC 2 framework and the AICPA’s five Trust Service Criteria – security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Organizations use SOC 2 audit reports as a trusted standard that informs others in detail about how well they’re protecting data in each of those five areas.
