Preparing for SOC 2

Most engineering teams already do half of SOC 2 without calling it that: code review, SSO, CI/CD, infrastructure as code. The first two weeks map existing practice against the Trust Services Criteria. Teams are routinely 40–50% covered before writing a single policy — starting from zero is a consultant fiction.

• Enforce SSO + MFA everywhere; kill shared accounts.
• Wire evidence collection into systems — IdP exports, IaC state, ticket automation — so proof is a query, not a screenshot ritual.
• Stand up centralized logging, alerting, and a tested backup/restore procedure.
• Build the vendor inventory and risk-review habit.

Only now write policies — short ones describing what is actually true. A 40-page aspirational policy is a finding waiting to happen; "production access requires SSO + MFA and is reviewed quarterly" is a control you can live with during a crunch. We run a cold evidence dry-run, fix what creaks, then bring in the auditor. Type I attests the controls exist; the Type II observation window runs afterwards while you operate normally.

Demystifying the evidence request list — these are the artifacts behind most SOC 2 controls, and every one can be produced automatically if wired up early: