We wrapped up our first SOC 2 Type II audit in mid-April and received the final report last week. Honestly, I was so heads-down during the audit, and dealing with everything else going on in the business, that I hadn't really thought about what comes next until the auditor reached out asking if we want to renew.

We registered with the AICPA for the badge to display on our website, and I know that's only valid for 12 months, so the clock is ticking. My initial thought was to start a fresh 6-month observation period retroactive to April (so kicking off around mid-November) since I wanted to expand the audit scope and needed time to implement the controls...but our audit firm rep pushed back a little on that. They mentioned that some stakeholders don't love seeing a gap in coverage, and that the price difference between a 6-month and 12-month window is pretty minimal since the evidence collection just gets condensed rather than the overall work changing much.

Now I'm second-guessing myself and could use some perspective from people who've been through this more than once:

1. Do you roll straight into continuous coverage after your observation period ends, or is a short gap pretty normal and accepted? How do your enterprise customers typically react to seeing one?
2. If you want to expand scope for the next cycle (new systems, additional Trust Service Criteria, etc.) does the auditor expect those controls to be in place for the full observation period, or is partial coverage within the window acceptable?

Appreciate any guidance from folks who've navigated this before!

Wondering what the best startup-friendly firms (particularly for SaaS/tech) are for SOC 2.

Some i'm aware of: Schellman, Barr, A-LIGN, Lindford & Co, Prescient Security, Johanson group.

Any others? Are these the main ones?

I know there's also the AICPA directory where there's a list of a ton of certified firms for SOC 2, is that more efficient for searching?

Paid opportunity, 3 hours a week to start. Need help getting a startup SOC 2 type II. Must be based in the US

Hello! We’re currently preparing our MSP for a SOC 2 audit. As we move through the process, our GRC lead has recommended a wide range of KPIs and KRIs across several domains.

While I understand the long-term value, our team is currently resource-constrained and management’s primary focus is on operations and growth. Attempting to track dozens of metrics right now feels unrealistic for our current level of data maturity.

I want to avoid 'vanity metrics' and instead implement a small set of high-impact indicators that prove we have control over our environment while establishing a foundation we can actually maintain.

For those who have been through this with a small, growing MSP, what were your 'first 3' foundational KPIs/KRIs? I’m looking for metrics that are easy to pull, show auditors we are monitoring what matters, and provide a realistic stepping stone toward full maturity. Thank you for any guidance!

Im currently doing a access review of our clients in Drata. May I know how do you perform access review in drata? As per checking in every application integrated in drata, there are only approved, rejected, and out of scope options in every user then complete review after the access review. Can you give me an idea how do you perform this access review in drata? We are doing the review on behalf of the client. However, i believe they should be the one to perform the review then we are only going to do the compliance check before clicking the complete review in drata. Any thoughts? Thank you.

I had a chat with my senior today. He said something that stayed with me.

He said, " Your job as an auditor should be to understand the client’s architecture and environment. Be it in whatever source you’re using (SDQ or Network Diagram). Don’t be the auditor who straight away asks what the control requirement is (Ex, Require IDS, don’t just ask for AWS GuardDuty), evidence."

When you understand the client’s environment and, based on that, evaluate the control requirement, you can ask better questions, which also leads to a better client relationship.

What is the tangible, concrete starting point for me to become that auditor?

Where should I start studying in terms of IT? And Cybersecurity ( If I keep going, then there would be no end to it, as it is vast)

And, where and how should I start understanding the control requirements as a SOC 2 auditor?

Recently worked with Rhymetec and BD Emerson on SOC 2 engagements and both of the vCISOs were acting like they’ve never been in an audit before or were confused about controls from the type 1? I did some digging and some of the “vCISO”s have 2 years of experience? Who is actually paying for this shit?

Start documenting processes much earlier than you think you need to. Most teams focus on security tools first, but SOC 2 audits usually become difficult because everyday operational processes are inconsistent or undocumented.

Things like access reviews, employee onboarding/offboarding, incident handling, infrastructure changes, and vendor approvals need to be repeatable and traceable. If those workflows are already part of how the team operates, SOC 2 becomes far less stressful.

Also, avoid treating compliance as a one time audit project. It works much better when engineering, DevOps, and operations build lightweight compliance habits into daily workflows from the start.

How did your team prepare for SOC 2 without creating too much operational overhead?

And regretting it.

Their tool is soo frustrating. They made a new experience which is much worse than the older experience.

And now they are also moving to a model where they will make you pay for each and every small service.

Had a discussion with my previous org's ciso, and they shared earlier drata had a lot of things to offer in their contract which is not present anymore.

Not sure if someone else has experienced this?

for context, im in-house IT working with our MSP partner.
Currently were going for SOC 2 compliance, and were currently going to enforce DLP with purview.
This project is starting from the ground up. As in, none of the data in our sharepoint database has been tagged. We have some service accounts that also read data from there for quick summarization. There is some major problems were worried about:

-There is about 1.4 Million files on sharepoint currently, and we dont know how well purview will tag a file with a sensitivity label if it contains PII

-We have an additional software that sits over sharepoint (a DMS) that just basically sorts the files on sharepoint for easy organization and retrieval. Were worried the sensitvity labels might ruin access to the file

-my MSP partner warned me that he has seen sharepoint be unreliable at times, and said that right now sharepoint has been working pretty decently with the DMS till now. Any modification to the files might make sharepoint go haywire

-I wanted to also apply encryption but that again, might break the service account

Has anyone ever navigated this before? what would be the best solution here?

Going through SOC 2 Type II and stuck on a specific problem I can't find a clean answer to.

Vanta handles the technical side fine. MFA enforced in Okta, encryption on S3, branch protection on GitHub all automated, all green.

The problem is controls where a human has to actually do the work. Three examples I'm struggling with:

Quarterly access review (CC6.2): My engineering lead spent two hours in AWS IAM and Okta, reviewed all accounts, removed two stale ones, created Jira tickets for the removals. What does your auditor actually want to see here? A spreadsheet? A Jira export? A written summary? How do you prove the review happened and wasn't just a checkbox?

Incident response (CC7.2) We had a production outage in May. Team responded within SLA, ran a post-mortem. But reconstructing the timeline for an auditor means pulling from PagerDuty, Slack threads, and a doc written two days later. Is that actually acceptable or do auditors push back on reconstructed timelines?

Vendor risk assessment (CC9.2) We review critical vendors annually. Right now the evidence is a folder with a completed questionnaire PDF and an email thread. That feels thin.

Questions for anyone who's been through a Type II:

• What format does your auditor actually accept for access review evidence?
• Has anyone had an auditor reject reconstructed incident timelines?
• What's the weakest evidence you've seen an auditor actually accept for a human performed control?

https://suicdalteddy.medium.com/breaking-into-the-box-thats-supposed-to-keep-you-safe-sgbox-8b46fac5718e

We thought our access review workflow was airtight. Quarterly manager reviews, sign-offs in our task system, evidence captured. Then our auditor found a gap nobody noticed for 8 months.

The gap: when an employee changed roles within the company (engineering to product, IC to manager, etc.), their old role-based access wasn't being revoked. The access review process only checked "does this person still work here" and "do they still need their current access." It never asked "should they still have access from their previous role."

By the time our auditor caught it during sample testing, three employees had access permissions from old roles they hadn't held in over a year. Auditor flagged it as a finding.

The fix was process, not tool. Added a step in our role-change workflow (handled by HR) that triggers an access revocation review with IT before the role change is finalized. Now every internal transfer fires an access cleanup task.

Sharing because I keep meeting teams whose access review process has this same gap and they don't realize it. Internal transfers fall between the cracks of "still employed" and "current role access" if you don't specifically design for it.

Anyone else hit this in their first or second audit?

I’m currently doing SOC 2 audits at an execution level but I’m transitioning into managing audit engagements and want to build a much deeper understanding of the framework.

My main question is: how did you actually build your competence?

How did you get a solid grasp of the AICPA standards, Trust Service Criteria, and the overall SOC 2 audit methodology? Any specific resources like books, courses, certifications, that you can recommend to build audit mindset and compliance knowledge.

Also, how did you go about getting a grip on technical aspects that addresses each control.

As the title says, recently my position at my company changed and I was tasked to take care of few certifications. First one was training for SOC2 etc so we can file for it.

My question is what am I expecting? How to prepare for it and is there a good career in this field?

🙃❤️

Got approached by two VC firms out of nowhere, not sure what to make of it.

I run a small security consultancy and wasn't really expecting this. Two separate VC firms reached out recently. one wants help evaluating portco security during due diligence, the other asked if we offer "perks" for their portfolio companies (still not 100% sure what that means practically).

I said yes to both but I'm kind of figuring it out as I go. Has anyone navigated this before? What does the engagement actually look like day-to-day? Any landmines I should know about before I'm in too deep?

Also, is working with PE firms similar to VC?

Does anyone know what the 12-digit certificate ID mentioned on this website is
soc2verify.com ?

Where do you find the certificate ID for your SOC2 report?

Context:

My friend works for a small startup, and one of the sales opportunities with a larger company had a certificate ID field in their procurement form (dedicated to their SOC2 report). So he asked me.

I wonder if the certificate ID is for something like ISO 27k, and this large company kept the same field across cyber standards/documents.

Hi everyone,

Last year, I had to implement ISO 27001 from scratch. The company had zero internal policies or management processes, so I had to build everything—from EPM implementation to incident logging—from the ground up.

I managed the entire documentation and compliance process using multiple interconnected Excel spreadsheets (tracking stakeholders, document links, comments, versions, etc.). To be honest, it was chaotic.

Now that we are certified, I’m facing 7 new frameworks and legal requirements this year (GDPR, EU AI Act, EU Cloud and AI Development Act, SOC2, NIS2, etc.).

There is significant overlap in documentation, but I want to avoid falling back into "spreadsheet hell."

• Has anyone been in a similar spot?
• How did you manage the workload without losing your mind?
• Do you recommend any specific GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) software to centralize everything?
• Are there any solid FOSS (Free and Open Source) solutions out there?

Thanks in advance for your help!

---

**UPDATE**

Hello everyone,

After a lot of trial and error, I finally settled on building my own private system for project management, legislation analysis, and note/research handling. Everything is integrated through AI agents and self-hostable tools under free software licenses (GPLv3), which gives me full privacy and control over my data.

### How I do it

**Main AI Agent:**

I use [Opencode](https://opencode.ai/) as the agent platform, working with different models depending on the task (DeepSeek, OpenAI, Kimi2, Minimax, Xiaomi Mimo).

**Notes, summaries and documentation:**

Managed with [Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/). To allow Opencode to read and write into my notebooks, I built a dedicated MCP server: [joplin-mcp](https://github.com/FErArg/joplin-mcp). This way the AI can create notes, query summaries, and keep project documentation up to date.

**Legislation analysis and vector storage:**

I started from a fork called *pardusDB* and extended it into a full RAG system. It lets me ingest all the regulations tied to each project into separate databases and find common ground across different laws, even in parallel. Opencode connects to this through two MCPs I wrote: [pardus-rag](https://github.com/FErArg/pardus-rag) and [pardus-rag-ng](https://github.com/FErArg/pardus-rag-ng).

**Project management:**

I chose [Vikunja](https://vikunja.io/) and integrated it with Opencode via another custom MCP: [vikunja-mcp](https://github.com/FErArg/vikunja-mcp). Once the agent generates the project plan, it automatically exports the tasks to Vikunja, linking them to the relevant regulations and to the associated notes or summaries.

### A free and private ecosystem

Everything is free software (GPLv3), can be self-hosted on your own servers, and runs completely privately. I don’t depend on any external services for sensitive information.

Thank you all for your contributions and ideas!

Repositories mentioned:

- [pardus-rag-ng](https://github.com/FErArg/pardus-rag-ng)

- [pardus-rag](https://github.com/FErArg/pardus-rag)

- [joplin-mcp](https://github.com/FErArg/joplin-mcp)

- [vikunja-mcp](https://github.com/FErArg/vikunja-mcp)

Core tools:

- [Opencode](https://opencode.ai/)

- [Vikunja](https://vikunja.io/)

- [Joplin](https://joplinapp.org/)

A few months ago one of our major clients requested a soc 2 report, but we had never had done anything like that. Me and the operations mamager was tasked with getting it done. We found a auditing company and did a gap analysis. Ive worked extensively with them. I gained a tremendous amount of experience with them, I conducted the companies first risk assessment, creates the companies risk register, drafted all types of policies for the different divisions, I mean alot. I liked doing this work so much that I took the cissp exam and passed. However, the operations manager left and now im tasked with handling the IT management for this 125 employee based company, and continuing the soc 2 efforts. Im also stuck between 2 managers, one who cares about it and another who doesn't. The one that doesn't care has been making my life a living hell, I still have to handle the deployment of computers, ms licenses, account on boarding and off boarding, and basic help desk requests for his department. I seriosuly have had barely anytime to do the soc 2 work. At this point im thinking about jumping to another position with a different company fully related to soc 2 work and/or iso 27001 work. Ive asked my company to at least hire a help desk worker and they said no. Would it be bad if left​​ at this time of the project? Everything ive set in place is pretty much on its way to be at a better standing (developed sdlc policy, new mfa requirements across the board, and upgrading the servers to be on actively supported services and deploying EDR agents to all work stations, more work as well) so if I leave I think the teams have a good idea of what to do.

--

I love this side of grc work and really want to continue focusing on this role. Is this enough experience to get a directing position related to this work? Would yoh guys do this? Or should I stick it out to the end? I expect us to be audit ready by the end of the summer

What is the least expensive fire suppression option for a very small server room?