In 2010, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) launched the voluntary Systems and Organization Controls 2 (SOC ) Compliance that helped to make the effectiveness of internal controls and security more evident when undergoing financial audits. The SOC 2 report includes three subreports, one that focuses on the service organization’s system and their design controls regarding financial reporting, one that describes the suitability and effectiveness of these controls for non-financial and trust services principles, and one that is similar to the second one but is written for a more general audience rather than IT experts.
In general, SOC 2 is a way for your business to ensure that your information security is as strong as possible, with emphasis on information privacy, confidentiality, and integrity. Being SOC 2 compliant can help your clients understand that you are focused on keeping their data secure and protected, especially in a cloud-based environment.
A SOC 2 Compliance Primer
SOC 2 reports drill down to the details of your organization’s internal controls and systems that help protect information sitting in cloud environments. These controls include any policies and procedures your business — and its partners — might use to protect data. Specifically, this report helps assure clients that even your third party partners are engaged in protecting sensitive data online using stringent protocols. If you — or your third-party partners — do not handle data correctly, it can lead to:
- Malware and ransomware attacks
- Data breaches
- Data theft or loss
- Reputational damage
- Loss of trust
All of these issues can severely impact your business, even if they happen do to oversight by a third-party partner.
Trust Service Criteria
Every SOC 2 audit includes five trust service criteria: Processing integrity, confidentiality, availability, security, and privacy.
Processing Integrity refers to quality assurance processes that help confirm that data in your control is not being manipulated in any way or compromised during the time you are processing it.
Confidentiality includes criteria that demonstrate that you have adequate protections in place for confidential data such as intellectual property and personal information. Protections may include firewalls, encryption, and both digital and physical access controls.
Availability means how accessible your data is to your internal systems and to any products or services received by your customers. These include processes surrounding disaster response and recovery, data backups, and the monitoring of incidents and responses.
Security refers to protecting systems used to create, archive, use, process, or transmit information. Typical policies and tools related to security can include firewalls, multi-factor authentication, penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, digital and physical access controls, intrusion detection, and others.
Privacy refers to personally identifiable information (PII) such as first and last names, addresses, contact details, and social security numbers. SOC 2 Compliance here means protecting and handling PII securely using things like encryption, access controls, secure disposal, and privacy and disclosure notifications.
If you are a service organization that uses a cloud-based environment, becoming SOC 2 compliant can help establish a level of trust with customers that can keep you ahead of the competition.
Let Perry proTECH Help You Achieve Compliance
As we move through this year, information security remains a hot topic for both companies and clients alike. For companies that outsource data to third parties such as those that offer cloud services, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and others it is important to assure your customers that their data is being handled appropriately and protected from potential cyberattacks. Successfully completing a SOC 2 audit is one way to establish a high level of trust that will increase your organization’s reputation and bring you to the forefront of the competition.
At Perry proTECH, we have all the tools you need to ensure SOC 2 compliance. Our cloud computing experts can provide assurance that you have all the right security protocols in place, including tools such as multifactor authentication, data encryption, remote monitoring, digital and physical access controls, disaster recovery and backup, firewalls, and more.
Get all five trust principles in order for your SOC 2 audit. Contact a Perry proTECH consultant and let our cloud computing experts create a safe, secure, trustworthy cloud environment for all your data.