SOC 2 Compliance Checklist: A Detailed Guide for 2025

With cloud-hosted applications becoming a mainstay in today’s world of IT, staying compliant with industry standards and benchmarks like SOC 2 is becoming a necessity for SaaS firms. Therefore, getting SOC 2 compliance isn’t a question of ‘why’ as much as it is a ‘when’. With that in mind, here’s a handy SOC 2 compliance checklist to help you plan and kickstart your compliance journey.

But before we get into the SOC 2 checklist, let’s understand the various nuances of the SOC 2 framework that will help you prepare better.

Getting audit-ready involves months of preparation, planning, and ticking things off on a rather lengthy checklist. Defining a scope, choosing the right trust service criteria, implementing internal risk, and assessing controls – these are just a few of your obligations before the reward – is certification. Let’s understand what each step under SOC 2 compliance checklist entails and also an easy shortcut at the end.

TL;DR
SOC 2 Compliance Process	The SOC 2 compliance process involves defining objectives, choosing the report type, conducting internal risk assessments, performing gap analysis, contacting an auditor, and more.
SOC 2 Compliance Automation	Automating SOC 2 compliance processes, from policy creation to evidence collection, saves time and resources.
Cost-effectiveness	Using automation tools for SOC 2 compliance will save you time and reduce costs associated with manual processes and potential non-compliance issues.

What is the SOC 2 compliance checklist?

The SOC 2 compliance checklist acts as a guide that helps organizations assess how customer data is collected, processed, stored, and accessed, thereby ensuring compliance with the Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) framework.

The SOC 2 checklist also reviews vulnerability management and risk mitigation. The checklist enables organizations to meet SOC 2 requirements, demonstrating effective controls over customer information security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

Why should you implement a SOC 2 checklist?

Implementing a SOC 2 checklist provides comprehensive coverage and simplifies the audit readiness process. It showcases your commitment to security, reassuring customers that their data is safeguarded. The SOC 2 audit prompts organizations to formalize and document policies, procedures, and controls.

Documenting these essential practices significantly diminishes business risks, enhances vendor management, and frequently streamlines operational efficiency.

SOC 2 compliance checklist

A well-designed SOC 2 requirements checklist will lay out actionable steps organizations can take to meet the extensive criteria of the framework across security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Based on our experience of helping hundreds of businesses become SOC 2 compliant.

Here’s a 9-step SOC 2 checklist:

1. Choose your objectives

The first action item of the SOC compliance checklist is to determine the purpose of the SOC 2 report. The specific answers to why SOC 2 compliance is important to you would serve as the end goals and objectives to be achieved in your compliance journey. 

With a clear understanding of your objectives, you can ensure the SOC 2 process addresses your particular reasons for pursuing compliance. This clarity will help drive decision-making as you work through defining the scope, assembling a cross-functional team, evaluating controls, undergoing auditing, and taking necessary actions to remediate gaps.

Here are some examples:

• Your customers have asked for it
• You are entering a new geography, and SOC 2 compliance will add to your strength
• You want to bolster your organization’s security posture to avoid data breaches and the financial and reputation damage that comes with it

That said, not wanting SOC 2 compliance because customers aren’t asking for it or because none of your competitors has it isn’t advisable. It’s never too early to get compliant. And it’s always an advantage to be proactive about your information security.  

Also read: How to make compliance your superpower

2. Identify the type of SOC 2 report you need

SOC 2 reports can be Type 1 or Type 2. You decide which one is appropriate based on your compliance goals.

A Type 1 report is faster, but only reflects the performance of controls at a point in time and affirms that your internal controls are in place. 

Type 2 confirms that the controls are working as expected when tracked over a period of time, and it is likely that you will be asked to produce a Type 2 audit report shortly after. It is comprehensive and demands a control monitoring period that can be as long as 6 months, but it produces a more vivid picture of the performance of your security controls. 

Connect with Sprinto’s SOC experts to know more about the type of SOC report suitable for your organization.

3. Define scope

Defining the scope of your audit is crucial as it will demonstrate to the auditor that you have a good understanding of your data security requirements as per SOC 2 compliance checklist. It will also help streamline the process by eliminating the criteria that don’t apply to you. 

You must define the scope of your audit by selecting the TSC that applies to your business based on the type of data you store or transmit. Note that Security as a TSC is a must. Regulatory requirements will also have a bearing on your criteria selection. That said, in our experience, most SaaS businesses typically only need Security, Availability and Confidentiality (or their combination) as TSC in their SOC 2 journey. 

What Are SOC 2’s 5 Trust Criteria? – YouTube

Here are some examples:

• Choose Availability if your customers have concerns about downtime.
• Choose Confidentiality if you store sensitive information protected by non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or if your customers have specific requirements about confidentiality.
• If you execute critical customer operations, such as financial processing, payroll services, and tax processing, you should include processing integrity.
• Include Privacy if your customers store PII (Personally Identifiable Information) such as healthcare data, birthdays, and social security numbers.

On that note, a bad example here would be leaving a relevant TSC out of your SOC 2 scope. Such oversight could significantly add to your cybersecurity risk and potentially snowball into substantial business risk.

A SOC 2 audit looks at your infrastructure, data, people, risk management policies, and software, to name a few items.  So, at this stage, you must also determine who and what within categories will be subject to the audit. For instance, you can keep some of your non-production assets from the scope of the audit. 

4. Conduct an internal risk assessment

Risk assessment is crucial in your SOC 2 compliance journey. You must identify any risks and document the scope of those risks from identified threats and vulnerabilities.

Assign a likelihood and impact to each identified risk and then deploy measures (controls) to mitigate them as per the SOC 2 checklist.

Once you have identified the risks, score them based on its impact and likelihood of that risk scenario actually playing out. A common mistake organizations make in this stage is scoring risks based on guts rather than reality. A better, auditor approved way of scoring risks is by using industry grade benchmarks. 

A compliance automation platform like Sprinto builds a true, up-to-date inventory of assets and gives you the tools and capabilities to define risks at an asset level. Using its comprehensive risk register, you can identify, risks associated with your assets.

5. Perform gap analysis and remediation

You must examine your current control status and security practices and compare their compliance posture with how they measure against SOC requirements.

A compliance automation tool like Sprinto can make this process a lot easier by integrating with your applications and scanning the environment for control gaps and vulnerabilities. From a single dashboard, you can view the health of all controls, risks, and issues that require your attention. The auditor-friendly d