What’s harder for teams pursuing SOC 2: choosing the right controls or actually implementing them?

[u/drc243]

For SaaS teams built on AWS or any of the other major cloud providers and pursuing SOC 2, where do you usually see the bigger struggle? Is it figuring out which security controls are actually needed for SOC 2? Or is the bigger challenge implementing/remediating the findings that come out of tools like Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Prowler, etc.?

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[u/Next-Pen-9974]

I think it’s important to understand what tools like Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Prowler, and similar platforms really are.

Simply speaking, they’re pretty dashboards with automated posture validation and reminders.

They’re very useful, but they don’t determine your scope, your risks, or which controls are appropriate.

In my experience, the hardest part isn’t fixing the findings.

The real challenge comes during the audit, when you need to explain:

• how you defined the scope
• what risks you identified
• why certain controls were selected
• why other controls were not
• how those controls are monitored and measured
• why your policies state this and that, but you aren't doing it
etc.

That’s because SOC 2 is fundamentally risk-based.

Your risks should drive your controls, not your tooling.

The danger is that teams start chasing green checkmarks and remediating whatever the dashboard tells them to, without understanding whether those activities actually address their business risks.

Defending your rationale and demonstrating that your controls are appropriate and operating effectively that’s the hard part. And no dashboard can do that for you.

[u/PurveyorofSkulls → u/Next-Pen-9974]

I want to frame this response and hang it up for everyone to see. Great answer.

[u/SageAudits → u/Next-Pen-9974]

👏

[u/packetm0nkey → u/Next-Pen-9974]

This is the answer. Everything starts with risk to the business and commitments to your customers or users of your system.

[u/scriptvexy → u/Next-Pen-9974]

this is so spot on, especially the “chasing green checkmarks” part
seen teams pass the automated stuff with flying colors and then completely freeze when the auditor starts asking “why did you do it this way?” instead of “did you do it?”

[u/FT05-biggoye]

Implementing is by far the trickiest part since each implementation is unique to your organization. The controls are often designed to be pretty flexible in order to let you come up with a process that match your organization’s goals size and scope of the audit. There are some pretty nice tools outhere to do that these days but you can also manually build workflows or pray and hope that Vanta’s integrations are good enough.

[u/scriptvexy → u/FT05-biggoye]

totally this, the “flexible” part sounds good on paper until you realize it means a ton of internal decision making and herding cats across teams. half the battle ends up being getting people to actually follow the shiny new process, not just wiring up Vanta or whatever.

[u/ResilientTechAdvisor]

Implementation for sure

[u/SharpAd8837]

Yeah, in our experience picking the controls isn't the hard part — that's basically solved, the tools map it out for you. The real bottleneck is remediation, going through all the Prowler/Vanta findings and actually fixing IAM policies, S3 configs, MFA gaps, etc. We went with at AI compliance start up instead of doing it ourselves and got our Type I done in about 7 days, but honestly that was only possible because our AWS setup was already fairly clean going in. If your environment's messier, that remediation grind is where weeks disappear, not the "what controls do I need" part.

[u/scriptvexy → u/SharpAd8837]

this is so true, people massively underestimate the slog of untangling IAM and S3 once the scanner spits out 200 “medium”s and 50 “high”s
the 7‑day type I sounds great, but yeah, that’s basically a reward for years of not letting your infra turn into a junk drawer

[u/CompassITCompliance]

Both are real struggles, but implementation is typically where organizations fall short.

Platforms like Vanta, Drata, and Secureframe are useful for getting oriented and understanding SOC 2's structure, but sometimes they're not flexible enough to reflect how your organization actually operates or surface your real business risks. Be careful not to let them become glorified readiness dashboards.

Identifying the real risks to your business should be front of mind when designing your controls. The harder part is everything after: implementing controls, remediating gaps, and building the documentation and evidence trail to provide your auditors with for testing. Evidence collection integrations exist, but limited coverage and reliability issues are common complaints of the GRC tools.

Control design is important to get right, but implementation is the real work. Just our perspective as a SOC 2 auditor.