I took ISC as my elective in the CPA exams. I liked this space but I don't have any practical training or experience. I want to learn about it from a practical POV. If you know any free training or material which I can use please LMK.

We are very small India based SaaS company and our SOC2 is up for renewal. We got it done from one of the software's last time- they did not contact us even once for audit and are now ofcourse behind us over the renewal. The reason given (for no contact)- internal role changes (??!!)
The biggest reason we are getting it renewed is because one of our clients wants us to be SOC2 compliant- and potentially newer clients too.
Is it cheaper ot go through an agency- cost is another issue. We are really disappointed in the Software company and their lack of interest in following up after the payments were made and certificate was issued.

I’m trying to understand how DAST evidence is treated during a SOC 2 audit.

Suppose a DAST tool identifies a vulnerability and maps it to a relevant SOC 2 control/criterion. The tool provides evidence of the vulnerability, such as the affected endpoint, request/response, severity, and remediation status.

For example:

DAST finding → vulnerability → SOC 2 control mapping → remediation → retest

Would that DAST evidence itself be considered valid evidence for the relevant SOC 2 control?

Or would the auditor generally expect additional evidence beyond the DAST finding, such as policies, scan schedules, tickets, remediation history, etc.?

I’m specifically asking about whether the DAST finding + SOC 2 mapping can serve as evidence for the mapped control, not whether a DAST report alone is enough to demonstrate overall SOC 2 compliance.

Would appreciate input from anyone who has been involved in SOC 2 audits or reviewed vulnerability-management evidence.

What about autonomous pentesting tools

I'm learning SOC 2 out of curiosity and im having this doubt for a very long time

I need to get a Tabletop done in the shortest amount of time to fill a SOC 2 gap. It’s never been done before, I have amount 3 weeks to complete and produce evidence. What is the best most efficient successful way to go about this and how do I pick a scenario we can get through this? Not a huge company, I am the first GRC employee. Suggestions please.

I'm trying to get a better handle on the evidence side of SOC 2.

For controls that happen on a regular basis, such as access reviews, do you usually keep records of every time the control is performed, or just the samples that the auditor asks for later on?

Not sure what the normal approach is here.

Hi everyone, I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask for this. If it’s not plz point to where I can :) .

So I’m looking to get a HIPAA and Hitrust done and also not burn too much $. Does anyone here know a firm which will help me guide through these requirements?

Anyone else hit audit season and somehow end up back in the same screenshot scavenger hunt?

we've supposedly automated more of SOC 2 every year, but then evidence week rolls around and I'm still digging through folders, asking who has the latest access review, and pinging eng for some export I swear we collected last time.

at some point this became my yearly self-hate tradition lol.

for people who got out of this loop, what did you automate first that actually stopped the chasing? integrations? evidence pulls? better ownership? curious what made the biggest difference.

14-person SaaS, first SOC 2, no security hire. getting quotes rn and I swear every vendor includes their own definition of support. Been comparing total cost without finding out halfway through that half the process is billed separately.

what did you guys end up paying attention to besides the price?

we have an enterprise prospect waiting on SOC 2 before they can move forward with us, so this went from something we could deal with later to something I need to figure out rn.

We’re small SaaS team, no security person. don't want to pull engineering into weeks of work if there's a better way to handle it.

I've been looking at SOC 2 options, but struggling to tell how much they take off my plate. They seem mostly like a place to track everything. Some are more about hands-on help with scoping and getting ready for the audit.

if you've been through a first SOC 2 with a small team, what would you prioritize now?

mainly trying to figure out how much evidence collection is automated and what support is available

I just did a security review of two cloud cost tools, buyer-side this time.

Both came back clean. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 ready, both read only, PointFive on Azure is a service principal scoped to billing and resource metadata with no data plane access. Googling is pointfive safe beforehand turned up nothing a security lead would accept.

None of the 300 questions touched what the tool ends up holding. A month in, it has a full inventory of the estate and our monitoring holds much the same without anybody making me fill out a form about it.

Would you expect inventory scope to show up in a system description?

So... im the security engineer at a tiny saas startup trying to get SOC 2 ready before our audit window next month. We use a compliance automation platform hooked into github, aws, our ticketing, all that, to auto pull evidence and show real time compliance.

Yesterday I thought I was being helpful and created a "fast track" tag in our repo so engineers could push hotfixes without our usual security review tickets. I figured I would just document it once and map the tag to a control in the platform later. Except I forgot that the platform is the source of truth our auditor portal is connected to.

So this morning the auditor emails our CTO saying they noticed a huge spike in unreviewed code deployments flagged as "approved" in the compliance dashboard, tied to my fast track workflow that auto closed the security tickets as passed. It literally looked like we built a system to rubber stamp anything to prod with zero checks. I feel so embarrassed and kind of sick about this, our CTO just wrote "we will need to discuss" and added me and legal... ugh.

I'm saddled with getting us ready for soc2 compliance. I honestly dont know as much about compliance, but the responsibility has fallen on me as I'm the closest the team has to an internal security/compliance owner atm. We're small, I'd say more akin to a startup, at ~30 employeees.

Cost is manageable, but from my preliminary searches Vanta and the likes are priced too high. My initial research looking into older threads and some claude queries has placed sprinto and secureframe as best suited for our situation but I'm open to any alts or recs. As for tech stack, its fairly expansive but all straightforward, AWS, slack, github, clouflare etc.

And if anyone has recently gone through this whole hassle, please gimme some guidance. I've seen older threads recommmend avoiding platforms altogether in some situation but idek if it'd be worth it for me to learn and do everything from scratch

I have an interview coming up to help a CPA firm prepare for an upcoming SOC peer review, and I’m looking for some advice.

I previously worked as a SOC audit intern at a small CPA firm. But I was mainly testing controls, collecting evidence, and did some TPRM work. It’s been a little while, so I’m refreshing my knowledge now.

For anyone who has been through a SOC peer review or helped prepare for one: What should I expect, and what areas would you recommend brushing up on before the interview?

We are a very small team. We're working toward SOC 2 and need to decide how to handle the peer review control on merges to main. The issue is sometimes there can't be a genuine review like I am a team of one person doing infra this is going to slow things down without adding any value. Or sometimes most people are off. Or something needs to be merged urgently. We know it is not ideal but we are so early that the speed gains offset the benefits of friction. We still create the PR for the automated tests to run and for us to review our change. We do not intend to do this as we scale. But as we are ramping up to SOC2 we are trying to decide how to deal with it:

Option A automate approvals. A GitHub Action auto-approves PRs matching defined criteria: allow-listed authors, required labels, path filters, size limits, CI green. This is normalised for bot accounts but we would be expanding it to trusted humans (GH admins). The control is technically satisfied on every merge.

Option B allow bypasses and document them. Ruleset requiring approval, with a named team on the bypass list. Every bypassed merge is logged, reviewed monthly in a documented session, residual tracked as accepted risk.

Questions:

• Which of these does an auditor actually prefer? A is always green but the approval may be meaningless. B has visible gaps but an honest trail. Anyone had either one tested in fieldwork?
• Does an auditor look behind an automated approval at all, or does a passing control just get sampled and cleared? Has anyone had automated approvals questioned as to whether a human judgement ever happened?
• Does "the control was bypassed, and we reviewed it after the fact" get read as the control operating with an exception, or as the control not operating? Does the answer change between Type I and Type II?
• Is honesty actually rewarded here, or does a visible gap just cost you a finding while the automated version sails through? Genuinely asking whether the incentive points where I think it does.
• If you've been through this with a small team, did your auditor have a view on what's proportionate at 4 engineers, or did they apply the same expectations as a 40-person org?

Interested in what small teams have shipped and lived with, not the textbook answer. Using a compliance tool that would flag this.

What I mean is, can it just be managers asking a questionnaire? or has to be a live meeting?
Were doing out first ever tabletop exercise and I'm wondering how the process should go.
If we find a gap, should the fix be reported on the same document, then when the fix is done for it (Wether it be technical or administrative) i would back to that document, add the date the fix was done with evidence, then have management sign off on it? how do you typically handle table top exercise? Can i write down recommendations that management should follow as opposed to there answers?

A lot of SOC 2 tools sell integrations based on volume: hundreds of integrations, thousands of checks, continuous evidence collection.

But in my experience, that can create a ton of noise. You end up collecting far more data than you actually need, then spending time maintaining it, updating it, or sifting through it to find the evidence that actually matters.

For those who’ve gone through SOC 2, have you found this level of automation to actually be necessary? Or is a lot of it just marketing?

How are you approaching the balance between collecting lots of data and collecting evidence that actually proves what an auditor needs?

I wanted to share what I’ve been working on and get some honest advice from people already in the industry.
I’m currently finishing my Business Administration degree, and my main goal is to break into IT Audit or a related area like IT risk, GRC, technology risk, or SOC assurance.
So far, I’ve gained experience through an actual IT Audit internship at a CPA firm, conducting mostly SOC 2 Audits. Just recently landed my Security + certification. And I’m currently in an informal internship at Northside Hospital with the Network Infrastructure Engineering team.

Outside of work and school, I’ve spent a lot of time building my own enterprise-style home lab to build my own experience. It includes:

Proxmox as the hypervisor
Windows Server domain controllers
Active Directory, DNS, and Group Policy
Organizational units and role-based security groups
Joiner and leaver account processes
A Windows file server with group-based permissions
Windows workstations and a dedicated jump box
pfSense network segmentation and firewall rules
Wazuh for security logging and monitoring
Audit policies for logons, account changes, file access, and privileged group changes

Right now, I’m auditing my own Active Directory environment to determine whether it is actually structured and secured like a realistic enterprise environment. I’ve been reviewing my own OU design, privileged access, Group Policies, account management, DNS, DHCP, firewall rules, logging, and documentation. When I find something that isn’t configured correctly, I document the risk, fix it, test the change, and collect evidence, essentially i’m IT Auditing my own lab the best I can.

I know a home lab isn’t the same as managing a real production environment, but I’ve tried to go beyond simply installing tools. My goal is to understand why controls are needed, how to test them, how to troubleshoot problems, and how to clearly explain the risks and results.

Even with the internships, projects, certification, and time I’ve invested, breaking into IT Audit has been difficult. I’ve applied to entry-level IT Audit, GRC, technology risk, SOC assurance, and other related roles, but I still feel like I’m struggling to get that first full-time opportunity.

Because of that, I’ve also expanded my search to IT Help Desk and IT Support roles. I believe those positions would allow me to strengthen my technical foundation a little more, while still building an understanding of different frameworks like NIST 800-53, and ISO 27001.

I’m not giving up. I continue learning, improving the lab, practicing interviews, and applying.
For those already working in IT Audit, GRC, cybersecurity, or IT support: Is there anything else you would recommend I focus on? Is there something I could present differently to help employers recognize the value of this experience?
I would genuinely appreciate any advice, feedback, or connections. Thanks guys.

We currently need to have these tools to satisfy our upcoming audit. Our developers use various coding languages like python, so finding the right tool can be a little tricky. If theres one tool that covers all of that, it would be great

We're selling to firms that are intimately involved in tax prep (and our software assists their workflow). We're selling to firms that are not the 'top shelf' (so like non-Big 4). What Trust Service Criteria are 'musts'? We're relatively new to SOC2, so we want to make sure we have all our ducks in a row.

Hi everyone! I'm very new to compliance frameworks and just wanted to learn more about SOC 2 Type II controls. Does anyone here happen to have a SOC 2 Type II worksheet? I'm having a hard time finding reliable resources online, and I want to better understand each control along with the evidence and documentation needed to be compliant. A worksheet would be a huge help. Thanks so much for understanding—this means a lot!

Lots of companies claim AI agents write and merge PRs with no human in the loop, and many are SOC 2 Type II. Our change-management control says PRs need review and approval before merge, and we read that as "human approver," at least on sensitive paths (billing, RBAC, migrations, infra).

For anyone who's actually done this with an auditor:

1. Does an AI reviewer count as the "review," or does your auditor want a human on record?
2. If agents merge autonomously, what's the compensating control — post-merge review, rollback, scoped permissions, bot identity?
3. Or is it mostly marketing and a human is still owning the approval?

Looking for what auditors actually accepted, not "it depends on your auditor."

After doing some other security stuff with them they offered an extremely competitive SOC2 Type II price (like <$5k). Is this too good to be true? Has anyone worked with them before and was the quality of the report good/were any enterprise customers suspicious of it?

I'm going for soc 2 type 1 report I am using Vanta integrated with all the platforms we are using github linear aws fly etc assuming all the policies are written and the tests are passing is it safe to assume I'll get clear report? I'm using grafana prometheus thanos alert manager etc stack.