Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance is a voluntary compliance framework created by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) to help financial institutions better manage security, risk and data management. Over time, several different audits and reports based on SOC have emerged, the most popular of which is SOC 2.
The SOC 2 audit process is a comprehensive assessment that demonstrates an organization’s commitment to security and data privacy. Many organizations pick up SOC 2 certification specifically to raise the security profile of their brands and encourage trust from users and clients.
While that seems straightforward, the fact is that SOC 2 can be a long, rigorous and challenging audit that takes months to years to complete. Additionally, once you’ve achieved SOC 2 certification, you must continually demonstrate your continued compliance annually.
How in-depth a SOC 2 audit will depend on the type of assessment you ask for. That’s because SOC 2 is built on what is known as the 5 Trust Services Criteria, all built around security, confidentiality and data privacy.
In this article, we will introduce each of the five Trust Service Criteria in SOC 2.
What Are the 5 Trust Services Criteria in SOC 2 Audits?
The five Trust Services Criteria categories are:
- Security
- Availability
- Confidentiality
- Privacy
- Processing Integrity
Each one covers a specific aspect of IT and data management, and under each category is a select number of controls and measures that your organization must have in place to successfully undergo an audit including that category.
Security
Security is the primary criterion in SOC 2… if you are undergoing SOC 2 certification, then at minimum you are undergoing a security audit.
Under the Security category, your organization shows that it implements critical security measures to prevent unauthorized access to data. Typically this means security like a firewall, data encryption and any other technical controls that protect data at any point of its life cycle in your system.
Additionally, “security” can refer to physical or administrative practices that keep unauthorized personnel away from data as it rests in data centers or workstations. It can also refer to your ability to understand risk management and gap analysis and to take preventative or remediation actions in the case of a data breach.
Availability
This category contains controls that guarantee that, as information moves through your system, it is available for technical or business operations. More specifically, this refers to how data can move into critical areas where it is leveraged for any business purpose. For example, availability might refer to the way that your staff can use that data for business analytics. Additionally, it might refer to how data is made available to customers in a product like an online dashboard containing financial information.
Most organizations choose to assess their availability criteria when a key part of their business is making sure that the data they store can be used by either employees, clients or both.
Confidentiality
As the name suggests, this category focuses on your organization’s ability to protect the confidentiality of confidential data from creation or ingestion to removal. “Confidentiality” is actually a very specific definition under SOC 2. It defines the information that has at part of its use limits to access and retention, specifically limits to certain parties. This information might be designated as confidential by law (as in the case of, for example, minors) or information that is confidential due to the industry use or application.
Privacy
Privacy, much like confidentiality, refers to how your organization protects access to data. Unlike confidentiality, which refers to various forms of sensitive information, privacy controls specifically apply to personal data. Specifically, privacy criteria cover a variety of practices around how your organization communicates with data subjects about the use of their private data, including:
- Notification of goals related to privacy
- Disclosure of choices around the use of private information
- Limits to the use and retention of private data to strict business purposes
- Access capabilities for data subjects who want to review and correct private information
- Disclosure of private data with data subject consent to meet business and privacy goals
- Ensures the quality of the information, including updating and maintaining accuracy
Processing Integrity
Finally, the processing integrity category allows you to show that your business and IT processes have complete, valid, accurate processing protocols in place that guarantee things like the correctness of data processing outcomes and protection through proper authorization controls. These are important criteria for many businesses heavily invested in their supply chain, or members of larger industry supply chains (like in the healthcare industry or the Defense Industrial Base).
Which Trust Services Criteria categories apply to your company?
The first step to issuing a SOC 2 attestation is determining which Trust Services Criteria categories to include. All of them may apply to your service organization, or perhaps only security will be relevant. Make sure to get advice from SOC 2 experts such as the professional SOC 2 auditors at Continuum GRC.
Continuum GRC fields expert security professionals with a deep knowledge of SOC 2 and the larger cybersecurity ecosystem. More importantly, these experts manage, create and operate robust compliance auditing and automation tools that can take your security assessments to the next level. With this kind of automation, you can minimize reporting and documentation tasks that would normally take weeks to timelines of days.
Continuum GRC is proactive cyber security®. Call 1-888-896-6207 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization protect its systems and ensure compliance.
[wpforms id=”43885″]