Build software that passes SOC 2 Type 2 — without a six-month fire drill.

Type 1 is a point-in-time snapshot — controls exist on the date of the report. Type 2 covers an observation window, typically 6 to 12 months, and tests whether the controls actually operated. Enterprise buyers and federal primes almost always want Type 2 with a 12-month window. Type 1 is useful as a stepping stone if you need a report on the wall in 90 days while the Type 2 window runs.

First-year reports usually run a 6-month window to get something signed faster, then renewals shift to 12 months. You cannot meaningfully shorten observation — auditors need to sample evidence across the period. What you can shorten is fieldwork and report drafting. With evidence automation in place, fieldwork compresses from 8-12 weeks of back-and-forth to roughly 2 weeks of auditor confirmation.

Security (Common Criteria) is mandatory. Availability is standard for any SaaS with an SLA. Confidentiality applies if you handle customer data under NDA, which is most B2B. Processing Integrity matters for transactional systems — payments, healthcare claims, payroll. Privacy is heavy and we usually defer it unless you're handling consumer PII at scale or already chasing GDPR/CCPA alignment. Scope tightly; every added criterion adds controls and audit hours.

No. They replace the screenshot-collection misery and give you a control inventory mapped to evidence. You still need a CPA firm to issue the opinion. The mistake we see is teams treating the platform's green checkmarks as the bar. Auditors will ask questions the platform doesn't — sample 25 terminations, walk through a specific incident, evidence a backup restore test. The platform is plumbing, not a substitute for engineering rigor.

We build a vendor registry in whatever system of record you already use — usually a database table or an Airtable — with fields for SOC 2 report URL, expiration, data classification, and risk tier. A scheduled job flags reports expiring within 60 days and opens a ticket. Subprocessors handling customer data get reviewed annually with documented sign-off. The point is to make the next renewal cheap, not to build a compliance product internally.

Concretely: a Lambda that exports Okta user lists weekly to an Object Lock S3 bucket, a GitHub Action that records every prod deploy with PR approvers, a Datadog monitor that alerts on backup job failures and files a Jira ticket, a quarterly script that diffs AWS IAM against your HRIS to catch ghost accounts. Each artifact maps to a specific control ID. Auditors get read-only access to the evidence locker and pull samples themselves.

Different track, but related. Federal work runs through FedRAMP, FISMA, or CMMC depending on the agency and data type. SOC 2 controls overlap meaningfully with NIST 800-53, so the engineering work is reusable — IAM, logging, change management, incident response. As an SDVOSB, we routinely architect systems to satisfy SOC 2 for commercial customers and a NIST 800-171 / CMMC Level 2 baseline for federal customers from the same codebase.

In order of frequency: terminated employees still had access at sample date, a production change was deployed without a documented PR review, a vendor's SOC 2 report expired mid-period and wasn't refreshed, backup restore tests were never actually run despite the policy saying quarterly, and access reviews were performed but not signed by the reviewer. Every one of these is preventable with automation we put in during the first month of engagement.

Two phases. Phase one is a 3-4 week readiness assessment: we inventory your systems, map controls to existing engineering practices, identify gaps, and produce a remediation backlog with effort estimates. Phase two is implementation — typically 8-16 weeks depending on starting posture — where senior engineers embed with your team to ship the controls, wire up evidence automation, and run the month-nine dry audit before fieldwork begins.