SOC 2 Automation: What Is It, and Why Do You Need It?

SOC 2 automation helps streamline the preparation for the audit process by assisting with scoping your report, outlining necessary actions, and running assessments to ensure you’re ready for the audit. 

While not everything in a SOC 2 audit can be automated, automating what you can is a huge time-saver and cost-cutter for your business. Compliance automation.

Essentialy, it eliminates the need for doing things from scratch, such as manually mapping the relevant SOC 2 criteria or validating controls. It is a quick and confident approach to compliance that helps you build a responsive compliance program.

Read on to understand what SOC 2 automation is and how you can achieve it with the right software.

What is SOC 2 compliance automation?

SOC 2 compliance automation uses technology to streamline crucial parts of the SOC 2 attestation. Continuous monitoring of controls, management of policies, and evidence collection are some examples that can be automated with SOC 2 compliance automation.Moreover, it gives you control over your security program and 360-degree visibility into your compliance and security posture.

Why do you need SOC 2 automation?

Organizations need SOC 2 automation to streamline SOC 2 implementation, monitor controls continuously, ensure resource optimization, maintain exhaustive documentation, and ensure scalability. SOC 2 automation expedites audit readiness and helps achieve certification faster. Fill your details in the block to get a complete list of SOC 2 controls.

As a cloud-hosted business, you have several information assets, such as servers, S3 buckets, load balancers, laptops, and more. And if you list all the assets where information is stored, including your vendors, the list could run into thousands! SOC 2 Compliance requires you to secure all your information assets per the risks identified for each of them.

For instance, if it’s an S3 bucket, you must ensure it isn’t publicly accessible. Or, if it’s an EC2 instance, you need to protect its Secure Socket Shell (SSH) access and keep the database and hard disk encrypted.

In essence, every asset type needs a different kind of security check. Now imagine running and monitoring these checks on thousands of assets every day. Trust us; it will soon snowball into a security nightmare!

What can be automated for SOC 2?

A SOC 2 compliance automation software can eliminate the need to work hundreds of hours. Following are the list of processes that can be automated for SOC 2 compliance framework:

• Automated mapping of Trust Service Criteria to relevant controls
• Creation and distribution of policies org-wide
• Risk identification and assessments, along with automated scoring and prioritization
• Deployment of controls such as access provisioning, de-provisioning, encryption, etc.
• Continuous monitoring of internal controls to raise alerts for any failures
• Automated evidence collection and mapping to criteria
• Monitoring of third-party risks
• Automated generation of compliance reports
• Facilitating change management with automated tracking of changes and approval of requests
• Helping track vulnerabilities and incidents till closure by integrating with third-party tools

Steps to automate SOC 2 with Sprinto

Sprinto is a compliance automation platform that can help you automate SOC 2 and ensure your systems are continuously compliant with the framework.

You can automate SOC 2 with Sprinto in 4 easy steps:

• Integrate Sprinto with your tech stack and map all entities that impact data security
• Conduct an integrated risk assessment to understand your risk status and use the risk library to identify and implement missing security controls
• Activate automated checks to continuously monitor controls and minimize compliance instances of non-compliance
• Leverage Sprinto to collect compliance evidence in an audit-friendly manner and launch an external audit with an auditor from the Sprinto’s network to complete audits fast

The main dashboard gives you a quick snapshot of the real-time view of controls and enables you to take actions quickly while automated workflows help you streamline repetitive tasks.

Capabilities like in-built policy templates, training modules, role-based access controls and integration with 200+ cloud applications help you get audit-ready in weeks.

Take the case of one of our clients ZapScale. They were looking for an automation solution that could ease the burden off of compliance tasks and help them with granular-level monitoring.
Sprinto enabled 24/7 compliance checks for different information assets and ensured that the organization achieved continuous readiness. In the words of the co-founder Bratish

“Like a personal assistant Sprinto reminds us when and where we need to take action whether it’s related to infrastructure or access and nudges us towards it”

SOC 2 Manual vs Automated: What’s the Difference?

As cloud-hosted companies, you would have an intrinsic understanding of the benefits of automation. Aside from the generic advantages, here are the key factors that swing the deal in favor of automation.

The opportunity cost of time and employee productivity

It is possible and common for organizations to use a DIY approach or hire a consultant to get their SOC 2. Many organizations have taken up the task and succeeded in it too. However, it would help if you asked whether you have the time and resources to allocate toward getting SOC 2 audit ready in-house.

Taking up the manual approach to SOC 2 requires your key engineering hires and the CTO to spend considerable time (300+ hours) setting up the processes and documentation initially.

And later, after a successful attestation, they will need to monitor and maintain compliance and repeat the entire process before the SOC 2 attestation expires (a year later).