When it comes to security audits, SOC 2 compliance has become a crucial framework for any provider or developer to validate security standards. Businesses may achieve SOC 2 compliance by working with service providers or auditors as the basic requirements in order to develop trust between two parties. SOC 2 compliance has become an invaluable asset to organizations moving to cloud computing platforms and managing cloud security. While this audit framework has been widely adopted and used to verify security standards, organizations may have some of the following questions around SOC 2:
1. What Does SOC 2 Compliance Mean?
SOC 2 compliance is an audit and reporting framework issued by an authorized institution that verifies systems reliably protect customer data. This audit consists of several elements. Customer data is the main subject of security compliance when it comes to this business security assessment. There is also a matter of availability of the procedure, as well as integrity. These components are part of the requirement and the technical audit procedure itself. The security policy and procedure would be determined by the compliance implementation. Security-aware businesses should make compliance the basic requirement when hiring a provider, developer, or security auditor.
2. What Is SOC 2 Compliance?
SOC 2 is a fundamental attestation and certification for any IT service company, organization, or provider that stores customer data in the cloud. Both software vendors and service providers that store user(customer) data in the cloud, and work with enterprises and regulated industries such as healthcare may need to comply with SOC 2 standards. Â SOC 2 has become a common requirement for software vendors working with enterprise organizations or regulated industries. Â Organizations should consider setting security policies and procedures and work with verified assessors or auditors to achieve compliance.
3. What Are The Requirements for SOC 2?
Security policy and procedure development is  a core requirement of SOC 2compliance. Policies must be comprehensively written and treated as mutual guidance in process. Policies and procedures should cover elements including security, confidentiality, availability, data privacy, and processing integrity. This compliance feature highlights the basic auditing requirements for managing the data stored in the cloud. Both sides need to ensure that all requirements are accommodated, and come to a mutual understanding and agreement about the security policy and procedure.
4. Why Do You Need SOC 2 Compliance?
SOC 2 compliance is a fundamental value for any tech-based or tech-related organization to gain trust from customers and verify security standards. SOC 2 compliance demonstrates your ability(and quality) to protect customer data stored in the cloud. Security incidents that lead to customer data leaks may result in costly compensation and jeopardize the  company’s reputation. In a world with many security risks, SOC 2 certification enables organizations to validate their security efforts and prove that they are protecting user data from potential security breaches.
5. What Monitoring Should Be Established?
In order to achieve SOC 2 Compliance, teams must have  practices and procedures that eliminate faulty factors within the company or organization system. Organizations must  monitor suspicious activities or practices around  unauthorized or unusual actions. Security procedures  should be implemented to monitor potential malicious, and unknown activities. Teams should  monitor unauthorized access and phishing attacks as well as monitor and detect misuse of cloud resources and threats around production systems and services.
6. What Alerts Should Be Configured?
At a minimum, alerts should be set up to inform you of any unauthorized or malicious access to customer data in the cloud. It is  very important that these alerts happen in real time, or with minimum delay. Corrective actions and security response should occur in a timely manner when dealing with any unauthorized access. In addition, alerts should cover file transfer, data modification, privileged access, and changes to accounts. Your organization should manage alerts using a framework that guarantees the exclusion of false alerts. Alert systems should be configured to respond to abnormal activities, while remaining silent when normal activities are occurring, so that your team does not need to respond to false alarms all the time.
7. What Security Visibility Is Needed?
SOC 2 compliance undoubtedly requires deep and comprehensive visibility that covers even the lowest level of user activity. Your team should be able to see security events and detect any suspicious activities no matter where they come from. The simplest threats can come from the host level as users or hackers misuse login credentials. Organizations should implement host-level protections that  cover user events  as well as processing, connections, and other necessary processes. As detailed in auditing procedures, SOC 2 compliance demands a more rigid visibility level as well.
8. What Auditing Is Required?
Meeting requirements of SOC 2 compliance requires you to implement detailed auditing and log collection. This type of auditing procedure requires you to set audit trails that give your security operations to have a richer and deeper context. By collecting and aggregating detailed event logs, your team can obtain a fast yet accurate response from the auditing procedure whenever a suspected security incident occurs. An established auditing process provides your team with an effective way to start remediation on security issues.
9. What Security Incidents Should Be Prevented?
SOC 2 compliance requires you to set protective measures to prevent security incidents from occurring across your organization and IT infrastructure. Security incidents must be addressed and prevented in order to to comply with security requirements. You should also ensure that audit logs with sensitive data are stored in a compliant manner. When you store customer data in the cloud, any threats or incidents, recognized or unknown, must be addressed. Complying with the SOC 2 framework requires you to monitor incidents or suspicious activities and be able to immediately take effective remediative action as soon as possible. Preventing security events and achieving SOC 2 will enable your team to gain the trust of your clients and end users.
10. Is AWS SOC 2 Compliant?
Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a widely used provider for cloud-based infrastructure and data storage. AWS is fully compliant with SOC 2 and has undergone independent audits in order to achieve third-party reports. As a client or customer of AWS, your team can view AWS SOC 2 security reports. With that said, AWS SOC 2 reports do not automatically make your organization SOC 2 certified. Ultimately it is up to your team to ensure that your organization meets SOC 2 security standards in order to achieve SOC 2 certification within your organization.
