SOC 2 Readiness: What Growing Companies Should Have in Place Before Starting an Audit
For many growing companies, SOC 2 becomes a priority when an enterprise customer, prospect, or business partner asks for assurance that sensitive information is being handled securely.
The natural reaction is often to start looking for an auditor. But an audit should not be the first step.
Before beginning a SOC 2 examination, an organization should have a functioning security and compliance foundation: clearly defined controls, assigned ownership, documented processes, and evidence demonstrating that those controls actually operate.
The question isn't simply, “Do we have security controls?” It's “Can we demonstrate that those controls are designed appropriately, consistently performed, and supported by evidence?”
This guide outlines the areas growing organizations should evaluate before beginning their SOC 2 journey.
1. Understand What SOC 2 Actually Evaluates
SOC 2 is not simply a checklist of security controls. It is an independent examination of whether an organization's controls are appropriately designed—and, depending on the type of report, whether those controls operated effectively over a defined period.
The assessment is based on the AICPA Trust Services Criteria. Security is the required category, while Availability, Confidentiality, Processing Integrity, and Privacy may also be included depending on the services you provide and the commitments you make to customers.
This distinction matters because SOC 2 readiness should start with understanding your business, systems, customer commitments, and risks—not downloading a generic list of controls and trying to implement everything on it.
A growing company should be able to answer a basic question before moving forward:
What are we actually trying to provide assurance over, and what commitments have we made to our customers?
2. Define Your Scope Before Building Controls
One of the easiest ways to make SOC 2 unnecessarily expensive and difficult is to define the scope too broadly.
Before building or mapping controls, identify the systems, infrastructure, people, processes, data, and third parties that support the service being assessed. This typically means understanding where customer data enters the environment, where it is stored and processed, who can access it, and which technologies and service providers are critical to delivering the service.
Your scope should be broad enough to accurately represent the service provided to customers, but intentional enough that unrelated systems and processes are not unnecessarily pulled into the examination.
A useful starting point is to document:
The product or service being assessed
Systems and cloud environments supporting that service
Types of customer or sensitive data involved
Employees and teams with relevant responsibilities
Critical third-party service providers
Key data flows and system dependencies
Getting scope right early prevents significant rework later.
3. Establish Clear Control Ownership
A control without an owner is difficult to operate consistently.
Before an audit begins, each key control should have someone responsible for performing it, maintaining the supporting process, and producing evidence when required.
This responsibility should extend beyond the security team. SOC 2 often involves stakeholders across IT, engineering, human resources, legal, finance, and business operations. For example, HR may own portions of the employee onboarding and termination process, while engineering may be responsible for change management and vulnerability remediation.
During readiness, organizations should identify the owner of each control and confirm:
Who performs the control?
How often is it performed?
What evidence demonstrates that it occurred?
Who reviews exceptions or failures?
If those questions cannot be answered consistently, the control probably isn't audit-ready yet.
4. Formalize Your Core Security Policies
Having security practices in place is important, but for SOC 2, those practices also need to be consistently defined and understood.
Before the audit, organizations should formalize the policies and procedures that govern their key security activities. The exact documentation required will depend on the environment and scope, but common areas include:
Information security
Access control
Change management
Vulnerability management
Incident response
Risk management
Vendor and third-party risk management
Business continuity and disaster recovery
Data classification and handling
The goal is not to create policies simply because an auditor expects documentation. Policies should reflect how the organization actually operates, clearly assign responsibilities, and establish requirements the business can consistently follow.
A beautifully written policy that does not match actual practice can create more problems during an audit than it solves.
5. Make Sure Your Controls Actually Operate
For example, a policy may require quarterly access reviews, annual security awareness training, timely removal of terminated users, vulnerability remediation within defined timeframes, or formal approval of production changes.
Before entering an audit period, verify that these activities are actually happening at the frequency your policies and control descriptions require.
For each key control, ask:
Is the control being performed consistently?
Does the process match what our documentation says?
Are exceptions identified and addressed?
Can we prove the control occurred?
This is where readiness assessments often uncover the most important gaps. A company may have strong security practices but lack the consistency, documentation, or evidence necessary to demonstrate that those practices operate as intended.
6. Start Collecting Evidence Before the Audit
Evidence should not become a concern only after an auditor requests it.
Organizations should identify what evidence each control produces and establish a repeatable way to retain it. Depending on the control, evidence might include access review records, approved change tickets, vulnerability scan results, security training completion reports, incident records, risk assessments, or screenshots and system-generated reports.
More importantly, the evidence should demonstrate when the control occurred, who performed or reviewed it, what was evaluated, and how exceptions were handled.
Starting this process before the audit helps identify controls that appear effective on paper but do not produce sufficient evidence to support testing.
Think of evidence collection as part of operating the control—not as an administrative exercise performed for the auditor.
7. Address Third-Party Risk
Most growing companies depend heavily on third-party providers for cloud infrastructure, business applications, data processing, development tools, and other critical services.
Those dependencies can become part of your SOC 2 environment and should be understood before the audit begins.
Establish a process for identifying critical vendors, assessing the risks they introduce, performing appropriate due diligence, tracking identified issues, and periodically reassessing providers based on risk.
Depending on the vendor and service, due diligence may include reviewing SOC reports, ISO certifications, security questionnaires, penetration testing information, contractual security requirements, or other relevant assurance documentation.
The objective isn't to assess every vendor with the same level of scrutiny. The depth of the review should reflect the risk the third party introduces to your organization and customers.
8. Test Your Readiness Before the Audit
Before entering the formal audit period, perform a readiness assessment to evaluate whether your controls are appropriately designed, operating as expected, and producing sufficient evidence.
A readiness assessment should do more than confirm that a control exists. It should test whether the control can withstand the same types of questions and evidence requests you are likely to encounter during the audit.
For each control, evaluate:
Is the control appropriately designed for the risk it addresses?
Is there a clearly defined owner?
Is the control operating at the required frequency?
Does the available evidence support what the control says is happening?
Are identified exceptions being tracked and remediated?
Any significant gaps should be addressed before entering the audit period whenever possible. Finding those issues during readiness gives the organization time to remediate them. Finding them during the examination can result in exceptions, delays, additional work, or an unfavorable outcome.
Common SOC 2 Readiness Mistakes
Growing organizations often encounter similar challenges when preparing for their first SOC 2 examination. Some of the most common include:
Engaging an auditor before completing a readiness assessment
Defining the audit scope too broadly
Adopting generic policies that don't reflect actual business practices
Assigning all SOC 2 responsibilities to the security or compliance team
Documenting controls that are not consistently performed
Waiting until the audit to begin collecting evidence
Treating every third party as though it presents the same level of risk
Focusing on passing the audit rather than building sustainable security processes
SOC 2 readiness should not be about creating a temporary compliance environment that exists only long enough to satisfy an auditor. The goal should be to establish security practices the organization can continue operating as it grows.
How Do You Know You're Ready?
There is no single checklist that determines whether every organization is ready for SOC 2. Scope, architecture, business processes, customer commitments, and risk all matter.
However, before beginning the examination, you should be able to confidently answer yes to questions such as:
Have we clearly defined what is in scope?
Do we understand the risks associated with the service?
Are our key controls documented and assigned to owners?
Are those controls actually operating as documented?
Have we collected evidence demonstrating their operation?
Are critical third parties identified and appropriately assessed?
Have significant readiness gaps been remediated or formally addressed?
Can control owners explain how their processes work without relying solely on the compliance team?
If several of these questions are difficult to answer, additional readiness work is likely more valuable than immediately beginning the audit.
Final Thoughts
SOC 2 can be an important trust signal for growing companies, particularly when selling to enterprise customers. But the report itself should be the outcome of a functioning security and compliance program—not the program's entire purpose.
Organizations that approach SOC 2 as an opportunity to formalize ownership, strengthen controls, improve evidence, and build repeatable security processes are better positioned not only for the audit, but also for future customer and compliance expectations.
The best time to identify gaps is before the audit period begins.
Preparing for SOC 2?
If you're unsure whether your organization is ready, LMA Creative Solutions can help assess your current security and compliance environment, identify control gaps, prioritize remediation, and develop a practical roadmap toward audit readiness.
