Don't. You are exactly the wrong kind of firm to be pursuing SOC2.
SOC2 is like the corporate GPL of security. It's an infectious secret handshake company security teams swap in lieu of filling out security questionnaires. Nobody savvy takes it seriously.
There will come a time where your business will grow to the point where it makes sense to pay for the secret handshake. The overwhelming most likely scenario in which that happens is a purchase order made contingent on your SOC2 Type I attestation, where the revenue from that purchase order more than pays for the attestation.
Do not ever do a SOC2 speculatively, in the hopes that it will improve your sales prospects. Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.
- Document your data and security and share that with customers instead. You can say "We don't have SOC2 at the moment but here is all our security and data policy". It works 99% of the time for me.
- Very few companies truly have policy to reject a vendor if they don't have SOC2. Those are usually large enterprise or companies in sensitive areas such as Finance/Healthcare etc. Even then, SOC2 can be waived if you can demonstrate everything else.
Disclaimer: I run a bootstrapped SAAS with low 7 figures in ARR and even though we have ISO27001, we don't have SOC2 yet. However, we take our security/data etc very seriously and have tons of documentation and best practices that we always shafre with a customer who asks. Honestly, we will get SOC2 at some point just for the checklist as I don't really care too much about them otherwise.
Fully agree, the only downside is without a SOC2 you will be asked to fill out an insane 200+ questionnaire.
Good news is you have all these great LLM tools you can do this work for you, and just check it over.
I would add the caveat "...as long as you have no competition." If you're in a market where alternatives exist, and they have the certification, you're definitely transparently losing sales.
From the enterprise side, I can tell you vendor certification takes an order of magnitude more time/money/effort when the vendor says "we don't have cert X but here's a mountain of drivel you can paw through to try to assess risk." And not just once, but every single year during vendor reviews. It's just not worth it unless you're legitimately bringing something irreplaceable to the table -- to the point where even our executives know to google "companyname SOC2" before even engaging in a conversation.
| I would add the caveat "...as long as you have no competition." If you're in a market where alternatives exist, and they have the certification, you're definitely transparently losing sales.
I wouldn't say that its definitive, but it creates a big challenge. And they 100% will use it against you.
Even though I agree SOC2 in practice is of dubious security value, I do think you can lose out on sales if you don't have it. I recently had to choose among a bevy of headless CRM options for a client, and they were adamant that whatever platform we used _had_ to be SOC2 compliant. This narrowed the field significantly and ultimately we went with Strapi solely because of this requirement. I see this come up all the time.
Tools like Vanta (and I'm sure others, Drata maybe, I haven't used them) make SOC2 compliance pretty "easy" in the sense that it's often a mechanical process that doesn't require too much thought. At least for me, it usually involves being in a Slack channel with an auditor, and they're advising you on all the things to do (they want you to "win"/pass, although there is no real pass fail), and then you just need to check the boxes in Vanta.
I have an extended take on things like Drata and Vanta elsewhere in the thread. I think they're great if you know what you're doing, but dangerous if you don't: the expenses they incur are insidious, because they're not the sticker price of the software or the audit, but rather the unnecessary engineering they lead you to do.
*Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.*
We do have ISO27k1 and we had "customer/prospect for more" and they have a person that requires us to be "DORA compliant" it is just an excuse I know because we don't fall under DORA (they might be clueless about how it works that's other explanation). They do fall under DORA so they need to make sure they check their suppliers basically have ISO27k1 and are following what we wrote in ISO27k1 documentation.
We got away with not having ISO27k1 for years (filling in forms and proving we are doing good to people that care, I did have to go and talk with CISOs so they trust me I care about stuff) but not since 2025 in Europe, I firmly believe if we wouldn't do ISO27k1 last year, people would just stop talking to us based on feedback I got from business people (excluding pure "let's make an excuse" I wrote about above).
This said - I am not arguing against what tptacek wrote as he is way more experienced than I am, just stating my experience which also is a decade in SaaS. I am working for company that has between 20 and 30 employees so it also makes sense to be ISO27k certified. We deliver b2b to big companies.
As someone who had to cobble together a soc2 program - this is mostly true. At a large enough firm, soc2 is useful as a base level of operations integrity which lots of small firms lack.
If you have not reached that level as a firm, a good and recent pen test does the trick.
+1 and to add to that…this is the correct answer for basically any kind of “enterprise” requirement from a customer as a solo-founder
Don’t make anything harder on yourself before you have to and then at the point that you have to (like needing an authority to operate certificate for a classified network) you’ll have the resources to be able to get what you need
I learned that my business is unable to pass pretty much ANY certification or corporate IT security audit. Many of the questions simply do not apply to my business ("do you have documented procedures for revoking employee access") and the default answer is NO. Get even a single NO and you're done.
I gave up and these days actively discourage enterprises from even trying to sign up — these kinds of discussions can take a lot of your time and the expected value is negative, because sooner or later those kinds of questionnaires will be required (quite often the engineer talking to you doesn't even know this).
SOC2 falls into that category: you are unlikely to pass, and even if you do, enterprise customers will pull out their own questionnaires out of, well, let's just call it their store backrooms, and you will fail those. Waste of time.
Why do you think that's true? SOC2 isn't pass/fail, you receive a report on your business. You can have gaping security holes and be SOC2 "certified." It's just that your SOC2 audit will reflect that.
It won't even be that. You're not going to have any gaps in your Type I if your auditor is at all competent; your Type I documents what you were doing, aspirationally, at the time of your audit.
Same. For my business, the enterprises that want to use my software wouldn't actually be worth the hassle as their usage is not more than my normal business customers (SMB). Just more work and costs on my end.
Early on, I had a potential enterprise account (well known online store) that wanted everything that enterprises wanted in addition to multiple meetings (with all the stakeholders) for a $50/month account (my mistake for not getting that information upfront).
Another time, a large Canadian media company wanted me to agree to an uncapped liability provision. Respectfully turned them down.
All in all, I lost some prestige business but if I took them on, it wouldn't move my profit levels much.
Your getting that interest because it looks like a steal. Ultimately those businesses couldn't care less about $50/m (except to chance it) but they want - or even need - the enterprise terms.
They will pay $50 for your product... And probably $950 for the terms.
(Not saying that would have been the right thing for you but my advice to folks who find themselves in this position is always 20x or 40x the price - if that is enough to make it worth your bother, then go for it. Good chance theyll pay)
I'm currently at a small startup trying to do ISO 27001. A big issue we run into is that there simply aren't enough people. For example, the processes are built around having one person who writes code, and another person who reviews the written code. That's obviously impossible as a solo dev. You also need an internal auditor, who obviously needs to be separate from the operations team.
If I recall correctly the minimum in a standard setup is 9 roles which cannot overlap. You're going to have a very hard time doing that as a solo entrepreneur, so you'll probably need to find someone who is experienced in making unusual setups like these compliant - which isn't going to be cheap. Even after that there's a pretty decent chance you'll end up needing to hire 3rd-party services in order to be compliant: our "internal" auditor is just some big firm doing it for us.
We've been ISO 27k certified for years now. ISO 27001 relies heavily on risk documentation and mitigation; you can get around the separation-of-roles by calling them out as individual risks and making sure the appropriate authority signs off on them (ie: have an email from the CEO saying "I delegate Bob to create policies and sign off on them, and also perform our internal audits. I recognize the risks this creates but due to our size we accept them at this time.")
We are a team of 1 developer and 1 sales/marketing and are fully certified. You can hire an external auditor for the internal audit. We have AI code reviews, so we don’t need an extra developer.
I was part of several third party risk management audits from a corporate perspective.
We regularly audited and questioned SMBs (and big corps) with regards to their security posture. We knew that small shops wouldn’t be able to be fully compliant to SOC2 Type 2 or have an ISO27001 certified environment. If it was clear that our business wanted the product, we either tried to help the company with the questionnaire or created a risk report that was then signed by the business. In other words: even if your customer asks you to be compliant, you don’t have to be if they care enough about your product.
If you seem intent on getting things right, that’s a big plus. Most of your competitors don’t even know what SOC 2 is.
Can this also be done for HIPAA and FERPA, or for those compliance requirements is the process the way to go and just filling out the questionnaire would not be sufficient?
SOC2 is, at the end of the day, a voluntary compliance standard. HIPAA and FERPA requirements are federal law. Waiving those requirements would not just mean accepting additional liability, but would normally make your customer ineligible to receive federal funds, which are typically a substantial chunk of revenue.
Compliance with HIPAA for small firms is generally straightforward and there isn't a standard audit. It's not the same animal as SOC2, which is a CPA standard and is administered by certified auditors.
Avoid it for as long as you can. I worked at a startup that sold to enterprises. We had 6 employees. The CEO / sales was able to work around the SOC2 requirement every time.
My company had 6 employees, I was the CTO and I can't imagine getting SOC2 certified without using Vanta - that was back in their early access/beta days.
I had no choice - we had so many security assessments spreadsheets sent by potential customers, that getting SOC2 saved us time in the long run.
I like the people at Vanta just fine but it really squicks me out to see people doing Vanta because it's the simplest way for them to clear this dumb hurdle --- that implies that they don't understand SOC2 and are just taking Vanta's word for it.
The problem is, Vanta will ask (suggest? come perilously close to demand?) you do a lot of engineering work that is absolutely not necessary for a SOC2 attestation. Worse still: whatever controls you attest in your SOC2, you're practically locked into. If Vanta has you set up some cloud detection capability, and it turns out as you mature your security organization that it wasn't necessary or even useful, you have a fight on your hands with your Type II auditor about why you stopped doing it.
It's all negotiable. I did audits and attestations at a bank, .. everything's negotiable.
> that implies that they don't understand SOC2
Good engineering and SOC2 compliance can be on similar but not identical paths. If you want SOC2, you're bending your engineering towards that particular standard. Getting SOC2 compliant because it's time, and you have the customers, is just a step, and not a reflection of whatever good engineering you've done. If you can defend it, you can probably keep some of your variances.
If you're a solopreneur and you've never been in/near an audit, and you're committed to a vendor like Vanta, I'd recommend hiring a consultant for even a few hours to give you independent coverage of industry norms and a little coaching on sticking points.
I think we're in quite a bit of agreement.. sometimes the SOC2 review exposes gaps and you need to find a way to close them -- where do you look for critical path on that?
Also, SOC2 audits are sometimes coupled with more strenuous ones, so in the umbrella of audit season, you may have to demonstrate things, or records of things.
In my experience it was as simple as connecting to AWS and tagging resources in Terraform. I got it all done in around 3 weeks. So maybe yes, if somebody doesn’t know about SOC2 then Vanta might be getting in the way but it in my case it literally solved all my problems in a month or so
I’ll spend some more time replying to this next week, so circle back to this comment; I’m someone who regularly helps people get past these audits, meet the criteria customers are trying to assess with these certifications, and vet startups who don’t have these certifications or budget.
Then read through it and see what you can address immediately (EDR on your laptop, MFA on your cloud environments, etc), followed by role playing your client; “based on answers to this questionnaire, what would I not accept?”
There will be some items you can’t fix.
You’ll soon find out the majority of customers, including banks, governments, defence contractors, crypto startups — simply do not care. If they want to use your product, they’ll work with you.
It may be single-tenancy, it may require architectural changes, it may mean making it selfhosted with a time-bomb, but you’ll be able to address the requirements of the CISO, compliance monkey or executive.
I’ve yet to meet an industry or individual I can’t convince. Even if the product is a hot mess, half baked and radioactive — we’ll deploy it on a VM running inside of a VDI within the customer’s environment, because slopping together a migration path is _so easy_, and those early, highly regulated clients are worth it.
Please don't do any extra engineering for your wiki project simply because it appears on the Cloud Security Alliance CAIQ worksheet. These worksheets are built by committees where every member has a bunch of idiosyncratic controls and objectives that they slip into the document.
Sometimes good change comes from compliance. More than once I’ve seen major product resource shift to address major cybersecurity gaps, in response to a compliance led audit.
Compliance is not security, but engineers, especially solo ones tend to have their blinkers on when they’re trying to build something to first work.
Major problem of entire compliance/auditing industry is not enough asking in companies "what are the actual risks we are dealing with", "what's the goal for given control", "do we have alternative control ensuring that".
Compounded by cheap shitty auditors that just mark down checkboxes on a worksheet
Agree, see the Delve fiasco. But that’s not their job. Their job is literally checkbox. However some audits are so poorly done, or have auditors with zero real world engineering or cyber experience, they’re actively harmful to a product or customer base.
Example: insane, complex password policies and password rotation policies. These are still pushed by auditors rather than trying to build a reasonable exception case with the client.
No worries, it’s more about finding what the security and compliance teams care about — and making them comfortable. Compliance doesn’t equal security, I’ve onboarded startups with better security than the SOC2 certified, ISO27K Swiss cheese $B unicorn.
Hackers don’t target based on certification. It’s generally convenience and motive. Unknown startups who are laying solid foundations won’t show up on anyone’s radar for the first 2 years without some insanely unlucky event (i.e supply chain breach, an early employee doing something really dumb).
I've seen a small company do a SOC2 where the "CEO" seems to be
the only actual employee..
Its a lot of paperwork but it is supposed to scale for company size
so you could dismiss with a lot of the separation if the CEO accepts
risks and perhaps relies on a fair amount of external systems that are
already certified and has some contractors for specific tasks etc.
It’s a disadvantage for sure but not usually a blocker.
They often have security questionnaires you can complete instead. Or, as part of signing with them, you can promise to get SOC2 by x date (which will hopefully be easier with the funds from an enterprise contract).
I’d recommend looking online at some example security questionnaires or the types of things soc2 covers and writing an internal security doc for yourself so you know your position on everything and don’t have to scramble when it comes to it.
Big enterprise SOC2 gates are generally not real. In the limit, if you have a real deal with a real economic buyer who is actually sold on your product, you can do a conditional PO on your Type I (your Type I is automatic and can issue in a matter of weeks), but that really feels like more of a 2018 concern at this point; it's been awhile since I talked to anyone who truly had to SOC2 to close a sale.
It's important to really understand how unserious SOC2 is.
You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.
Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.
If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.
Like it or not, having a bus factor of 1 is a pretty big risk. You are a giant single-point-of-failure, which means that operations-wise you are a far riskier option to your customers than a significantly larger competitor.
I'm a solo entrepreneur running a b2b saas product I built. I do not have a soc2 certificate (or any certificate). I have never lost any sales (that I know of) because of it.
I've sold to customers that pay $2XX,XXX annually and it was never an issue. I wouldn't worry about it, but be prepared to answer security questionnaires.
As others suggested, as a solo entrepreneur, I recommend not entering this process without a real justification.
I passed this SOC 2 type for my startup after securing a deal with a big client.
SOC 2 is an ongoing process that involves many documents and workflows you will need to implement in your company.
If your clients really insist on proof of security compliance, I will try to find a local PT authority to complete a one-time process with them to obtain this kind of report.
Definitely possible. Start with SOC2-aligned practices and a solid public security page — many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate itself.
Do they? Every time I've been asked about SOC compliance, it turned out the underlying reason was either insurance or a requirement the customer had from their downstream customer. Neither of those cases would be negotiable, the customer's insurance company only cares about a checkbox that "All vendors are SOC2 compliant and relevant documentation is on file".
That said, actually being SOC compliant isn't that hard aside from the paperwork aspect. Any competent firm should already be doing all the things required, it's the bare minimum for security. There really shouldn't be any code or process changes needed, if there are you are woefully inadequate from a security standpoint. SOC2 is below the bare minimum for actual security, but it's the standard firms have settled on.
That said, actually getting a valid SOC2 audit completed is expensive and for a solo dev you can expect at least a month of lost time. I wouldn't pay out-of-pocket for an audit, but if you're in a space where customers are asking it can be a selling point. One strategy would be to negotiate reduced terms with a potential client to use their auditing firm and have them split costs on the audit. This would need to be a very hot sales lead, since it's a big ask, but it might be worth exploring. They likely already have an established relationship with an auditor, and having a referral will cut the price down.
SOC is just a box ticking exercise and doesn't improve security at all. Or at least it shouldn't, if you don't already meet their requirements you need to either shut down your side hustle or completely revamp your processes. That said, the box-ticking is extremely tedious and involves reams of paperwork. It would be doable as a solo entrepreneur, I worked through the process in a company of 6 employees, but it's not fun or productive.
> many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate
I work on audit compliance for a SOC2 compliant system, and as part of our own audit requirements it is non-negotiable that all of our vendors must themselves be SOC2 compliant.
I very much doubt anyone who has a SOC2 requirement is not in the same boat with respect to dependencies
You could look at the process itself and apply the things that sound good to you. It won't help with official certificates but you can start replying back saying you adhere to certain things that are suggested by SOC 2 Type 2.
I can also say that being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant doesn't come even remotely close to demonstrating that you can be trusted. That's not a knock on you or your work ethic, but there's tons of ways for things to go wrong or get leaked while still being SOC 2 Type 2 certificated.
A "SOC2 Type II" is just a repeated Type I audit where they make sure you haven't regressed anything. It doesn't make sense to use the definite article "the" with SOC2: everybody's SOC2 is different.
Ugh, it's hard. You can outsource as much as possible and minimize your surface area, those are the two approaches I have used, but the auditor expense is the biggest blocker. A few years back you could find auditors for $5-6k, but I think the security/audit service providers have eaten a lot of that market.
You can't automate it as it will require you to make big changes to your infra. It can take a year or more to actually do when you have a full team dedicated to it. Absolute outside the realm of a self service process.
I've been through SOC 2 Type 2 in a company with ~100 people. I think it'd be in some ways simpler as a solopreneur, but still a lot of effort. You won't require as complex controls and you don't need to communicate between different parts of company, but it'll just be yourself doing it all.
On a positive side, you won't have to do 100% of SOC 2 Type 2. The only required part is security if I remember correctly. And a lot of it is best practices that need to be in place anyway. If you are using an established cloud provider a lot of it is in place through their certifications. Some of the controls can be "silly", but generally not hard to put in place. I'd try to figure out what are the minimum nr of controls required and see if that is doable. Pretty sure auditors will give a discount there if the scope is smaller.
It can be somewhat useful for the company if taken seriously, as it can point out weaknesses in processes. Although I agree with other comments that most of it is a checkbox exercise than something that provides any real guarantees to the client demanding it.
I also don't know if getting through it with <20k $ is something that is feasible. Before doing SOC 2 we relied on the clients' security questionnaires instead, so maybe something to always ask about. Usually they were able to make an exception and allow it, although the % started shrinking over time.
Edit: Also, the auditor makes a difference. Pick one that understands small companies. A corporation auditor will get confused with "segregation of duties" if you are the only person in the company.
Agree with tptacek for the speculative case — chasing SOC 2 without a deal on the table is expensive theater.
That said, there's a real inflection point where it flips. We've run SOC 2 for companies where the trust-establishment effort alone was costing 2-3 sales cycles per quarter. At that point the audit pays for itself fast. also, we can get that audit down substantially below 20k...
The signal to watch: if you're losing deals to a competitor who has it, or spending more time on security reviews than closing, that's your major signal.
Also, if your sales cycle becomes "days" or weeks instead of months, thats another major signal. A third-party certification is a stamp of approval that cuts through red tape and BS.
I'm a vCISO and founder at MARFI Systems, currently finishing a doctorate in cybersecurity at GWU and have helped numerous companies from 1-man startups to 500+ unicorns. Happy to jump on a call and help provide some clarify around security and compliance.
Most early-stage founders don’t start with full SOC2 immediately. You can begin with strong security practices, transparent documentation, privacy policy, backups, access controls, and third-party audits before going for certification.
What kind of documents should I show customers to make them trust me that I follow best security practices? They trust Soc2 Type2, what else could work?
If they don't have a strict requirement on SOC2, then either PCI compliance or NSA CISA are more easily done without needing tons of money.
Edit: PCI would only apply if you are processing customer funds Iirc, it's been a few years since I went through one but thereay be some caveats for that to apply.
Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?
I'm in a similar position. The business continuity requirements are difficult to satisfy. And the amount of paperwork you need to do (depending on your policies of course) can be a major slow down for developing new stuff. So it's best to get your dev heavy stuff done before. I'm just filling in the questionnaires instead for now (and losing some customers who would be too big anyway)
I doubt it's possible. I'd avoid it as long as you can. It's been a continuous stream of audits for my the company I work for and resulted basically total loss of developer agency.
Mr. Maguire: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word."
Benjamin: "Yes, sir."
Mr. Maguire: "Are you listening?"
Benjamin: "Yes, I am."
Mr. Maguire: "AI."
I went through the process and while it seems it's daunting, it's just a bunch of work and some cash. Once established it's also transformative (or should be) on your ongoing processes and practices. You codify those into a bunch of documents (jesus, that's a lot of documents type of thing) and provide evidence for each; Auditors latch onto those randomly. It's then your job to upkeep documents and evidence which can be helped with tools that have frameworks for those. We use drata and it's really simple and helpful to use.
I don't think you would be able to be compliant as a solo dude though, not easily. A bunch of protocols and practices revolve around governance, handovers, failovers, risk mitigation etc and if you're the only guy there's a hard path ahead. Are you reviewing and approving your own code that goes to production? If things go down and you're the first to call (let's say by automated alerting) and you're not available, who is the next one to call as in what's the documented succession plan or automated remediation.. etc.
Compensatory controls do not strictly require a human, they require mitigation of risk associated with a single human. You'd have to automate a lot of these governances "gates" then. So it would be possible, since evidence you would have to provide is work not org-chart, but it'd be a ton of work.
I went into it thinking I need to answer these 167 documents and provide evidence on an ongoing basis, but it actually also transformed the way we do things. I think for the better. At the end of the day, I also think this can be gamed as probably most certificates, but it's not worth it and transformation you go through makes sense.
I can't say enough how not transformative SOC2 should be on your processes. Near-automatic exception-free attestations should be a byproduct of basic sane corpsec practices. SOC2 should never be leading or informing your security practices.
For people who don't know much about SOC2, the headline is that all SOC2 does is confirm that you do the things you say you do. There's a short vibes-based catalog of objectives --- things like "change management" and "access control" and "backups" --- but no actual standard on how any of those things are done. The controls you use to meet those objectives could be $50,000/yr enterprise software packages, or they could be a system of post-it notes. Your auditor does not care, so long as the things you say you do, you do consistently.
What happens all too often is that companies come into this process (usually ill-advisedly; probably as many as half the SOC2-attested firms don't really need to be) without clear objectives and security practices to begin with. They read the SOC2 DRL, reconcile it with what they are and aren't doing in IT already, and end up instituting whatever the "default" controls look like for each objective, which is how you end up with AWS SAAS startups running network intrusion detection in 2026.
I wrote a post 6 years ago for my clients who were ideating getting SOC2; it's about the (very small and very simple) set of engineering things you need to do to be in a place where you'll get an automatic SOC2 Type I attestation. It has held up very well. You should understand everything in this post well enough to have opinionated takes on everything in a SOC2 DRL, and to be in a position to tell your auditors to GTFO if they ask you to do more.
I completely agree with the outlook, but from a practical standpoint (in the last couple of years) I have seen the opposite. The SOC2 process is often transformative ("should" vs "is" are not the same thing).
Especially smaller startups, who grew somewhat quickly, and now "want to get SOC2 because customers want it". In practice this also (often, unfortunately) means "not all employees should have AWS admin creds, we should have some separation between environments, and we should know who has access to what".
For these companies SOC2 "requirements" can be the business-value line item that can get proper security and access-control patterns in place.
Near-automatic exception-free attestations should be a byproduct of basic sane corpsec practices.
being key here. if you realize it's not all that sane when you start reviewing things, what happened in our case was it allowed us (there were other signals as well) to regroup on our practices and then it was painless.
My monolith C++ backend passed SOC2 Type 2 without any real efforts from me as a programmer since I was very security cautious when writing code. Nevertheless this whole business is a racket and unless you commit to spending small fortune you will be just fighting windmills no matter whether you are actually compliant. In my case I've developed it for a client so it was their headache. I've just written couple of documents outlining compliance features. but before we got certified we would give clients same documents and that would give us free ride for a while.
It's 100% a racket. Your code could have been 10x worse and still passed, I doubt the auditors even looked at the code. It's a legal box-checking exercise, there really isn't much of an actual review besides the documentation. But my god is there a lot of documentation and paperwork.
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Don't. You are exactly the wrong kind of firm to be pursuing SOC2.
SOC2 is like the corporate GPL of security. It's an infectious secret handshake company security teams swap in lieu of filling out security questionnaires. Nobody savvy takes it seriously.
There will come a time where your business will grow to the point where it makes sense to pay for the secret handshake. The overwhelming most likely scenario in which that happens is a purchase order made contingent on your SOC2 Type I attestation, where the revenue from that purchase order more than pays for the attestation.
Do not ever do a SOC2 speculatively, in the hopes that it will improve your sales prospects. Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.
I will add a few more things to this:
- Document your data and security and share that with customers instead. You can say "We don't have SOC2 at the moment but here is all our security and data policy". It works 99% of the time for me.
- Very few companies truly have policy to reject a vendor if they don't have SOC2. Those are usually large enterprise or companies in sensitive areas such as Finance/Healthcare etc. Even then, SOC2 can be waived if you can demonstrate everything else.
Disclaimer: I run a bootstrapped SAAS with low 7 figures in ARR and even though we have ISO27001, we don't have SOC2 yet. However, we take our security/data etc very seriously and have tons of documentation and best practices that we always shafre with a customer who asks. Honestly, we will get SOC2 at some point just for the checklist as I don't really care too much about them otherwise.
Fully agree, the only downside is without a SOC2 you will be asked to fill out an insane 200+ questionnaire. Good news is you have all these great LLM tools you can do this work for you, and just check it over.
In my industry they still ask for the questionnaire even if you have a SOC2 report!
> It works 99% of the time
I would add the caveat "...as long as you have no competition." If you're in a market where alternatives exist, and they have the certification, you're definitely transparently losing sales.
From the enterprise side, I can tell you vendor certification takes an order of magnitude more time/money/effort when the vendor says "we don't have cert X but here's a mountain of drivel you can paw through to try to assess risk." And not just once, but every single year during vendor reviews. It's just not worth it unless you're legitimately bringing something irreplaceable to the table -- to the point where even our executives know to google "companyname SOC2" before even engaging in a conversation.
| I would add the caveat "...as long as you have no competition." If you're in a market where alternatives exist, and they have the certification, you're definitely transparently losing sales. I wouldn't say that its definitive, but it creates a big challenge. And they 100% will use it against you.
Even though I agree SOC2 in practice is of dubious security value, I do think you can lose out on sales if you don't have it. I recently had to choose among a bevy of headless CRM options for a client, and they were adamant that whatever platform we used _had_ to be SOC2 compliant. This narrowed the field significantly and ultimately we went with Strapi solely because of this requirement. I see this come up all the time.
Tools like Vanta (and I'm sure others, Drata maybe, I haven't used them) make SOC2 compliance pretty "easy" in the sense that it's often a mechanical process that doesn't require too much thought. At least for me, it usually involves being in a Slack channel with an auditor, and they're advising you on all the things to do (they want you to "win"/pass, although there is no real pass fail), and then you just need to check the boxes in Vanta.
I have an extended take on things like Drata and Vanta elsewhere in the thread. I think they're great if you know what you're doing, but dangerous if you don't: the expenses they incur are insidious, because they're not the sticker price of the software or the audit, but rather the unnecessary engineering they lead you to do.
*Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.*
We do have ISO27k1 and we had "customer/prospect for more" and they have a person that requires us to be "DORA compliant" it is just an excuse I know because we don't fall under DORA (they might be clueless about how it works that's other explanation). They do fall under DORA so they need to make sure they check their suppliers basically have ISO27k1 and are following what we wrote in ISO27k1 documentation.
We got away with not having ISO27k1 for years (filling in forms and proving we are doing good to people that care, I did have to go and talk with CISOs so they trust me I care about stuff) but not since 2025 in Europe, I firmly believe if we wouldn't do ISO27k1 last year, people would just stop talking to us based on feedback I got from business people (excluding pure "let's make an excuse" I wrote about above).
This said - I am not arguing against what tptacek wrote as he is way more experienced than I am, just stating my experience which also is a decade in SaaS. I am working for company that has between 20 and 30 employees so it also makes sense to be ISO27k certified. We deliver b2b to big companies.
Plus, even when you have SOC2 (+pen test, +ISO 27001), you'll still have to fill out questionnaires!
But it is a bit easier if you can copy/paste from your existing documents than scramble to make up stuff ;)
LLMs FTW
Superwhisper got SOC2 around the same month they hired their first employee
I would guess they did it for due diligence compliance, not to enhance their security practices. It’s a b2b checkbox.
As someone who had to cobble together a soc2 program - this is mostly true. At a large enough firm, soc2 is useful as a base level of operations integrity which lots of small firms lack.
If you have not reached that level as a firm, a good and recent pen test does the trick.
+1 and to add to that…this is the correct answer for basically any kind of “enterprise” requirement from a customer as a solo-founder
Don’t make anything harder on yourself before you have to and then at the point that you have to (like needing an authority to operate certificate for a classified network) you’ll have the resources to be able to get what you need
> in lieu of filling out security questionnaires.
Isn't that no longer an issue in AI era?
Do you want to trust your company's legal commitment on the output of modern LLMs?
I am a solo entrepreneur. Don't.
I learned that my business is unable to pass pretty much ANY certification or corporate IT security audit. Many of the questions simply do not apply to my business ("do you have documented procedures for revoking employee access") and the default answer is NO. Get even a single NO and you're done.
I gave up and these days actively discourage enterprises from even trying to sign up — these kinds of discussions can take a lot of your time and the expected value is negative, because sooner or later those kinds of questionnaires will be required (quite often the engineer talking to you doesn't even know this).
SOC2 falls into that category: you are unlikely to pass, and even if you do, enterprise customers will pull out their own questionnaires out of, well, let's just call it their store backrooms, and you will fail those. Waste of time.
> Get even a single NO and you're done.
Why do you think that's true? SOC2 isn't pass/fail, you receive a report on your business. You can have gaping security holes and be SOC2 "certified." It's just that your SOC2 audit will reflect that.
It won't even be that. You're not going to have any gaps in your Type I if your auditor is at all competent; your Type I documents what you were doing, aspirationally, at the time of your audit.
Same. For my business, the enterprises that want to use my software wouldn't actually be worth the hassle as their usage is not more than my normal business customers (SMB). Just more work and costs on my end.
Early on, I had a potential enterprise account (well known online store) that wanted everything that enterprises wanted in addition to multiple meetings (with all the stakeholders) for a $50/month account (my mistake for not getting that information upfront).
Another time, a large Canadian media company wanted me to agree to an uncapped liability provision. Respectfully turned them down.
All in all, I lost some prestige business but if I took them on, it wouldn't move my profit levels much.
Your getting that interest because it looks like a steal. Ultimately those businesses couldn't care less about $50/m (except to chance it) but they want - or even need - the enterprise terms.
They will pay $50 for your product... And probably $950 for the terms.
(Not saying that would have been the right thing for you but my advice to folks who find themselves in this position is always 20x or 40x the price - if that is enough to make it worth your bother, then go for it. Good chance theyll pay)
My plans start at $50. Top out at $10k a month.
I'm currently at a small startup trying to do ISO 27001. A big issue we run into is that there simply aren't enough people. For example, the processes are built around having one person who writes code, and another person who reviews the written code. That's obviously impossible as a solo dev. You also need an internal auditor, who obviously needs to be separate from the operations team.
If I recall correctly the minimum in a standard setup is 9 roles which cannot overlap. You're going to have a very hard time doing that as a solo entrepreneur, so you'll probably need to find someone who is experienced in making unusual setups like these compliant - which isn't going to be cheap. Even after that there's a pretty decent chance you'll end up needing to hire 3rd-party services in order to be compliant: our "internal" auditor is just some big firm doing it for us.
We've been ISO 27k certified for years now. ISO 27001 relies heavily on risk documentation and mitigation; you can get around the separation-of-roles by calling them out as individual risks and making sure the appropriate authority signs off on them (ie: have an email from the CEO saying "I delegate Bob to create policies and sign off on them, and also perform our internal audits. I recognize the risks this creates but due to our size we accept them at this time.")
I offered self-hosting to bypass this. It did the trick and I was able to convert the enterprise customers where compliance was a red line.
We are a team of 1 developer and 1 sales/marketing and are fully certified. You can hire an external auditor for the internal audit. We have AI code reviews, so we don’t need an extra developer.
Anyone who certified you with AI code reviews is a moron.
Let me guess: certified by Sprinto?
No, we are EU based and used a local certifier.
lol
I was part of several third party risk management audits from a corporate perspective.
We regularly audited and questioned SMBs (and big corps) with regards to their security posture. We knew that small shops wouldn’t be able to be fully compliant to SOC2 Type 2 or have an ISO27001 certified environment. If it was clear that our business wanted the product, we either tried to help the company with the questionnaire or created a risk report that was then signed by the business. In other words: even if your customer asks you to be compliant, you don’t have to be if they care enough about your product.
If you seem intent on getting things right, that’s a big plus. Most of your competitors don’t even know what SOC 2 is.
Can this also be done for HIPAA and FERPA, or for those compliance requirements is the process the way to go and just filling out the questionnaire would not be sufficient?
SOC2 is, at the end of the day, a voluntary compliance standard. HIPAA and FERPA requirements are federal law. Waiving those requirements would not just mean accepting additional liability, but would normally make your customer ineligible to receive federal funds, which are typically a substantial chunk of revenue.
Compliance with HIPAA for small firms is generally straightforward and there isn't a standard audit. It's not the same animal as SOC2, which is a CPA standard and is administered by certified auditors.
Thank you for your comment!
Avoid it for as long as you can. I worked at a startup that sold to enterprises. We had 6 employees. The CEO / sales was able to work around the SOC2 requirement every time.
My company had 6 employees, I was the CTO and I can't imagine getting SOC2 certified without using Vanta - that was back in their early access/beta days.
I had no choice - we had so many security assessments spreadsheets sent by potential customers, that getting SOC2 saved us time in the long run.
I like the people at Vanta just fine but it really squicks me out to see people doing Vanta because it's the simplest way for them to clear this dumb hurdle --- that implies that they don't understand SOC2 and are just taking Vanta's word for it.
The problem is, Vanta will ask (suggest? come perilously close to demand?) you do a lot of engineering work that is absolutely not necessary for a SOC2 attestation. Worse still: whatever controls you attest in your SOC2, you're practically locked into. If Vanta has you set up some cloud detection capability, and it turns out as you mature your security organization that it wasn't necessary or even useful, you have a fight on your hands with your Type II auditor about why you stopped doing it.
It's all negotiable. I did audits and attestations at a bank, .. everything's negotiable.
> that implies that they don't understand SOC2
Good engineering and SOC2 compliance can be on similar but not identical paths. If you want SOC2, you're bending your engineering towards that particular standard. Getting SOC2 compliant because it's time, and you have the customers, is just a step, and not a reflection of whatever good engineering you've done. If you can defend it, you can probably keep some of your variances.
If you're a solopreneur and you've never been in/near an audit, and you're committed to a vendor like Vanta, I'd recommend hiring a consultant for even a few hours to give you independent coverage of industry norms and a little coaching on sticking points.
I wrote at length downthread about how much engineering absolutely should not be bending towards SOC2; it's the opposite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150405
I think we're in quite a bit of agreement.. sometimes the SOC2 review exposes gaps and you need to find a way to close them -- where do you look for critical path on that?
Also, SOC2 audits are sometimes coupled with more strenuous ones, so in the umbrella of audit season, you may have to demonstrate things, or records of things.
In my experience it was as simple as connecting to AWS and tagging resources in Terraform. I got it all done in around 3 weeks. So maybe yes, if somebody doesn’t know about SOC2 then Vanta might be getting in the way but it in my case it literally solved all my problems in a month or so
I’ll spend some more time replying to this next week, so circle back to this comment; I’m someone who regularly helps people get past these audits, meet the criteria customers are trying to assess with these certifications, and vet startups who don’t have these certifications or budget.
Start by pre-filling your own CAIQ v4 with an earnest “we don’t do this” or “we haven’t even thought about this” attempt: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/cloud-controls-m...
Then read through it and see what you can address immediately (EDR on your laptop, MFA on your cloud environments, etc), followed by role playing your client; “based on answers to this questionnaire, what would I not accept?”
There will be some items you can’t fix.
You’ll soon find out the majority of customers, including banks, governments, defence contractors, crypto startups — simply do not care. If they want to use your product, they’ll work with you.
It may be single-tenancy, it may require architectural changes, it may mean making it selfhosted with a time-bomb, but you’ll be able to address the requirements of the CISO, compliance monkey or executive.
I’ve yet to meet an industry or individual I can’t convince. Even if the product is a hot mess, half baked and radioactive — we’ll deploy it on a VM running inside of a VDI within the customer’s environment, because slopping together a migration path is _so easy_, and those early, highly regulated clients are worth it.
Please don't do any extra engineering for your wiki project simply because it appears on the Cloud Security Alliance CAIQ worksheet. These worksheets are built by committees where every member has a bunch of idiosyncratic controls and objectives that they slip into the document.
Sometimes good change comes from compliance. More than once I’ve seen major product resource shift to address major cybersecurity gaps, in response to a compliance led audit.
Compliance is not security, but engineers, especially solo ones tend to have their blinkers on when they’re trying to build something to first work.
Major problem of entire compliance/auditing industry is not enough asking in companies "what are the actual risks we are dealing with", "what's the goal for given control", "do we have alternative control ensuring that".
Compounded by cheap shitty auditors that just mark down checkboxes on a worksheet
Agree, see the Delve fiasco. But that’s not their job. Their job is literally checkbox. However some audits are so poorly done, or have auditors with zero real world engineering or cyber experience, they’re actively harmful to a product or customer base.
Example: insane, complex password policies and password rotation policies. These are still pushed by auditors rather than trying to build a reasonable exception case with the client.
Do you genuinely use em-dashes in your regular writing ? I'm just curious because whenever I type I simply press -
An em-dash is just Alt-(regular-dash) on most well-configured compose key configurations, it's not any harder.
This is also the default macOS/iPadOS configuration. (So I use em-dashes when I'm writing an macOS/iPadOS, but not on Windows.)
iPhone.
Thank you! That make a lot of sense!
No worries, it’s more about finding what the security and compliance teams care about — and making them comfortable. Compliance doesn’t equal security, I’ve onboarded startups with better security than the SOC2 certified, ISO27K Swiss cheese $B unicorn.
Hackers don’t target based on certification. It’s generally convenience and motive. Unknown startups who are laying solid foundations won’t show up on anyone’s radar for the first 2 years without some insanely unlucky event (i.e supply chain breach, an early employee doing something really dumb).
Not possible in case your clients are not stupid. Any company with SOC2 and <5 people is a red flag.
You might find auditors that would go along but any reasonable client will check your SOC2 report and quality of your auditors.
SOC2 requires tons of paperwork and management and separation of duties with also mandatory roles in your company - never feasible in a one man show.
I've seen a small company do a SOC2 where the "CEO" seems to be the only actual employee..
Its a lot of paperwork but it is supposed to scale for company size so you could dismiss with a lot of the separation if the CEO accepts risks and perhaps relies on a fair amount of external systems that are already certified and has some contractors for specific tasks etc.
So that means that solo-entrepreneurs can't sell apps to big enterprises due to SOC2 limitation? I think that it is not fair
It’s a disadvantage for sure but not usually a blocker.
They often have security questionnaires you can complete instead. Or, as part of signing with them, you can promise to get SOC2 by x date (which will hopefully be easier with the funds from an enterprise contract).
I’d recommend looking online at some example security questionnaires or the types of things soc2 covers and writing an internal security doc for yourself so you know your position on everything and don’t have to scramble when it comes to it.
Thank you for your comment!
Big enterprise SOC2 gates are generally not real. In the limit, if you have a real deal with a real economic buyer who is actually sold on your product, you can do a conditional PO on your Type I (your Type I is automatic and can issue in a matter of weeks), but that really feels like more of a 2018 concern at this point; it's been awhile since I talked to anyone who truly had to SOC2 to close a sale.
It's important to really understand how unserious SOC2 is.
You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.
Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.
If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.
Like it or not, having a bus factor of 1 is a pretty big risk. You are a giant single-point-of-failure, which means that operations-wise you are a far riskier option to your customers than a significantly larger competitor.
It isn’t fair, but few rackets are.
I'm a solo entrepreneur running a b2b saas product I built. I do not have a soc2 certificate (or any certificate). I have never lost any sales (that I know of) because of it.
I've sold to customers that pay $2XX,XXX annually and it was never an issue. I wouldn't worry about it, but be prepared to answer security questionnaires.
As others suggested, as a solo entrepreneur, I recommend not entering this process without a real justification. I passed this SOC 2 type for my startup after securing a deal with a big client. SOC 2 is an ongoing process that involves many documents and workflows you will need to implement in your company. If your clients really insist on proof of security compliance, I will try to find a local PT authority to complete a one-time process with them to obtain this kind of report.
PT?
penetration testing
Thank you!
Definitely possible. Start with SOC2-aligned practices and a solid public security page — many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate itself.
Do they? Every time I've been asked about SOC compliance, it turned out the underlying reason was either insurance or a requirement the customer had from their downstream customer. Neither of those cases would be negotiable, the customer's insurance company only cares about a checkbox that "All vendors are SOC2 compliant and relevant documentation is on file".
That said, actually being SOC compliant isn't that hard aside from the paperwork aspect. Any competent firm should already be doing all the things required, it's the bare minimum for security. There really shouldn't be any code or process changes needed, if there are you are woefully inadequate from a security standpoint. SOC2 is below the bare minimum for actual security, but it's the standard firms have settled on.
That said, actually getting a valid SOC2 audit completed is expensive and for a solo dev you can expect at least a month of lost time. I wouldn't pay out-of-pocket for an audit, but if you're in a space where customers are asking it can be a selling point. One strategy would be to negotiate reduced terms with a potential client to use their auditing firm and have them split costs on the audit. This would need to be a very hot sales lead, since it's a big ask, but it might be worth exploring. They likely already have an established relationship with an auditor, and having a referral will cut the price down.
SOC is just a box ticking exercise and doesn't improve security at all. Or at least it shouldn't, if you don't already meet their requirements you need to either shut down your side hustle or completely revamp your processes. That said, the box-ticking is extremely tedious and involves reams of paperwork. It would be doable as a solo entrepreneur, I worked through the process in a company of 6 employees, but it's not fun or productive.
> many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate
I work on audit compliance for a SOC2 compliant system, and as part of our own audit requirements it is non-negotiable that all of our vendors must themselves be SOC2 compliant.
I very much doubt anyone who has a SOC2 requirement is not in the same boat with respect to dependencies
Thank you! Could you please share some great example of public security page so I can get some inspiration?
I was also interested in that and chatgpt came up with these:
https://iozen.ai/security/
https://logpulse.io/security/ SOC2 "in progress" haha
https://get.brightidea.com/security/
Thank you!
You could look at the process itself and apply the things that sound good to you. It won't help with official certificates but you can start replying back saying you adhere to certain things that are suggested by SOC 2 Type 2.
I can also say that being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant doesn't come even remotely close to demonstrating that you can be trusted. That's not a knock on you or your work ethic, but there's tons of ways for things to go wrong or get leaked while still being SOC 2 Type 2 certificated.
A "SOC2 Type II" is just a repeated Type I audit where they make sure you haven't regressed anything. It doesn't make sense to use the definite article "the" with SOC2: everybody's SOC2 is different.
Ugh, it's hard. You can outsource as much as possible and minimize your surface area, those are the two approaches I have used, but the auditor expense is the biggest blocker. A few years back you could find auditors for $5-6k, but I think the security/audit service providers have eaten a lot of that market.
Has no one yet found a way to vibe-code this into a viable self-service solution?
and yes I do understand there is a IRL-auditing authority piece to all of this too.
Perhaps there this is a play here in the market to create a new auditing firm that 99% automates all this for startups? sans fraud certs of course.
You can't automate it as it will require you to make big changes to your infra. It can take a year or more to actually do when you have a full team dedicated to it. Absolute outside the realm of a self service process.
I've been through SOC 2 Type 2 in a company with ~100 people. I think it'd be in some ways simpler as a solopreneur, but still a lot of effort. You won't require as complex controls and you don't need to communicate between different parts of company, but it'll just be yourself doing it all.
On a positive side, you won't have to do 100% of SOC 2 Type 2. The only required part is security if I remember correctly. And a lot of it is best practices that need to be in place anyway. If you are using an established cloud provider a lot of it is in place through their certifications. Some of the controls can be "silly", but generally not hard to put in place. I'd try to figure out what are the minimum nr of controls required and see if that is doable. Pretty sure auditors will give a discount there if the scope is smaller.
It can be somewhat useful for the company if taken seriously, as it can point out weaknesses in processes. Although I agree with other comments that most of it is a checkbox exercise than something that provides any real guarantees to the client demanding it.
I also don't know if getting through it with <20k $ is something that is feasible. Before doing SOC 2 we relied on the clients' security questionnaires instead, so maybe something to always ask about. Usually they were able to make an exception and allow it, although the % started shrinking over time.
Edit: Also, the auditor makes a difference. Pick one that understands small companies. A corporation auditor will get confused with "segregation of duties" if you are the only person in the company.
The only SOC2 anybody does is security and if your auditor tries to convince you that you need the other profiles they're rolling you.
Thank you for your comment!
fire the client.
either they will use the app without soc2 or they will find an alternative.
There are ways to do it. Send me a message, and I can make an intro to the person we use.
Agree with tptacek for the speculative case — chasing SOC 2 without a deal on the table is expensive theater.
That said, there's a real inflection point where it flips. We've run SOC 2 for companies where the trust-establishment effort alone was costing 2-3 sales cycles per quarter. At that point the audit pays for itself fast. also, we can get that audit down substantially below 20k...
The signal to watch: if you're losing deals to a competitor who has it, or spending more time on security reviews than closing, that's your major signal.
Also, if your sales cycle becomes "days" or weeks instead of months, thats another major signal. A third-party certification is a stamp of approval that cuts through red tape and BS.
I'm a vCISO and founder at MARFI Systems, currently finishing a doctorate in cybersecurity at GWU and have helped numerous companies from 1-man startups to 500+ unicorns. Happy to jump on a call and help provide some clarify around security and compliance.
You don’t it’s a waste of time and money.
Most early-stage founders don’t start with full SOC2 immediately. You can begin with strong security practices, transparent documentation, privacy policy, backups, access controls, and third-party audits before going for certification.
What kind of documents should I show customers to make them trust me that I follow best security practices? They trust Soc2 Type2, what else could work?
If they don't have a strict requirement on SOC2, then either PCI compliance or NSA CISA are more easily done without needing tons of money.
Edit: PCI would only apply if you are processing customer funds Iirc, it's been a few years since I went through one but thereay be some caveats for that to apply.
Also offering MFA and ideally SSO really helps them feel more secure.
Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?
I'm in a similar position. The business continuity requirements are difficult to satisfy. And the amount of paperwork you need to do (depending on your policies of course) can be a major slow down for developing new stuff. So it's best to get your dev heavy stuff done before. I'm just filling in the questionnaires instead for now (and losing some customers who would be too big anyway)
I doubt it's possible. I'd avoid it as long as you can. It's been a continuous stream of audits for my the company I work for and resulted basically total loss of developer agency.
Have the same feeeling....
A lot of early stage founders ran into this. Strong internal processes can already build a lot of trust before full SOC2 Type 2.
Mr. Maguire: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word." Benjamin: "Yes, sir." Mr. Maguire: "Are you listening?" Benjamin: "Yes, I am." Mr. Maguire: "AI."
I went through the process and while it seems it's daunting, it's just a bunch of work and some cash. Once established it's also transformative (or should be) on your ongoing processes and practices. You codify those into a bunch of documents (jesus, that's a lot of documents type of thing) and provide evidence for each; Auditors latch onto those randomly. It's then your job to upkeep documents and evidence which can be helped with tools that have frameworks for those. We use drata and it's really simple and helpful to use.
I don't think you would be able to be compliant as a solo dude though, not easily. A bunch of protocols and practices revolve around governance, handovers, failovers, risk mitigation etc and if you're the only guy there's a hard path ahead. Are you reviewing and approving your own code that goes to production? If things go down and you're the first to call (let's say by automated alerting) and you're not available, who is the next one to call as in what's the documented succession plan or automated remediation.. etc.
Compensatory controls do not strictly require a human, they require mitigation of risk associated with a single human. You'd have to automate a lot of these governances "gates" then. So it would be possible, since evidence you would have to provide is work not org-chart, but it'd be a ton of work.
I went into it thinking I need to answer these 167 documents and provide evidence on an ongoing basis, but it actually also transformed the way we do things. I think for the better. At the end of the day, I also think this can be gamed as probably most certificates, but it's not worth it and transformation you go through makes sense.
I can't say enough how not transformative SOC2 should be on your processes. Near-automatic exception-free attestations should be a byproduct of basic sane corpsec practices. SOC2 should never be leading or informing your security practices.
For people who don't know much about SOC2, the headline is that all SOC2 does is confirm that you do the things you say you do. There's a short vibes-based catalog of objectives --- things like "change management" and "access control" and "backups" --- but no actual standard on how any of those things are done. The controls you use to meet those objectives could be $50,000/yr enterprise software packages, or they could be a system of post-it notes. Your auditor does not care, so long as the things you say you do, you do consistently.
What happens all too often is that companies come into this process (usually ill-advisedly; probably as many as half the SOC2-attested firms don't really need to be) without clear objectives and security practices to begin with. They read the SOC2 DRL, reconcile it with what they are and aren't doing in IT already, and end up instituting whatever the "default" controls look like for each objective, which is how you end up with AWS SAAS startups running network intrusion detection in 2026.
I wrote a post 6 years ago for my clients who were ideating getting SOC2; it's about the (very small and very simple) set of engineering things you need to do to be in a place where you'll get an automatic SOC2 Type I attestation. It has held up very well. You should understand everything in this post well enough to have opinionated takes on everything in a SOC2 DRL, and to be in a position to tell your auditors to GTFO if they ask you to do more.
https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/03/12/soc2-starting-seven...
I completely agree with the outlook, but from a practical standpoint (in the last couple of years) I have seen the opposite. The SOC2 process is often transformative ("should" vs "is" are not the same thing).
Especially smaller startups, who grew somewhat quickly, and now "want to get SOC2 because customers want it". In practice this also (often, unfortunately) means "not all employees should have AWS admin creds, we should have some separation between environments, and we should know who has access to what".
For these companies SOC2 "requirements" can be the business-value line item that can get proper security and access-control patterns in place.
Near-automatic exception-free attestations should be a byproduct of basic sane corpsec practices.
being key here. if you realize it's not all that sane when you start reviewing things, what happened in our case was it allowed us (there were other signals as well) to regroup on our practices and then it was painless.
Thank you for your feedback!
My monolith C++ backend passed SOC2 Type 2 without any real efforts from me as a programmer since I was very security cautious when writing code. Nevertheless this whole business is a racket and unless you commit to spending small fortune you will be just fighting windmills no matter whether you are actually compliant. In my case I've developed it for a client so it was their headache. I've just written couple of documents outlining compliance features. but before we got certified we would give clients same documents and that would give us free ride for a while.
It's 100% a racket. Your code could have been 10x worse and still passed, I doubt the auditors even looked at the code. It's a legal box-checking exercise, there really isn't much of an actual review besides the documentation. But my god is there a lot of documentation and paperwork.