SOC 2 readiness assessment + checklist for 2025

In 2025, maintaining SOC 2 compliance remains critical, driven by evolving cyber threats and the growing need to build trust with stakeholders by demonstrating a commitment to cybersecurity.

The process is often costly, time-consuming, and resource-intensive, especially for startups and fast-growing SaaS companies. It becomes even more complex when there’s an unclear audit scope or reliance on manual, error-prone processes.

It’s crucial to ensure your business is truly audit-ready. Auditors dig deep—testing your controls, scrutinizing every document, and evaluating if your data handling practices align with the Trust Services Criteria (TSC).

That’s where the SOC 2 readiness assessment comes in. An internal team or an external consultant uses a SOC 2 readiness assessment checklist to thoroughly review your audit preparation efforts, allowing you to identify relevant TSC and pinpoint compliance gaps for remediation.

Failing to conduct this pre-audit review could cost you dearly: incorrect scoping and TSC, wasted resources, attestation delays, and potentially even penalties and reputational damage.

This blog is your go-to guide to why you need a SOC 2 readiness assessment, what it involves, and how a readiness checklist for 2025 can fast-track your path to compliance.

What is SOC 2 compliance?

SOC 2, short for Systems and Organization Controls 2, is a voluntary data security compliance standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It is primarily designed for service organizations (e.g., SaaS companies and cloud providers) that offer web-based data handling services.

Compliance with SOC 2 ensures that service providers establish and maintain a secure environment that safeguards the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (the CIA triad) of client data.

Primarily, a SOC 2 report has two purposes: 

• Enables your business to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, breaches, and cyberattacks.
• Allows you to build customer trust, demonstrating that your organization follows strong security protocols and manages their data securely and reliably.

Unlike other frameworks like HIPAA and GDPR, which mandate all companies to follow specific rules, SOC 2 requirements vary from one organization to another. This is due to SOC 2's flexibility in allowing organizations to design controls relevant to their specific systems and operations.

A SOC 2 audit is conducted by a licensed Certified Public Accountant (CPA) from an AICPA-accredited firm. A SOC 2 report attests that your data protection controls meet the framework’s requirements, which are based on the following five trust principles: 

• Security: Also called a common criteria, this TSC is mandatory for all SOC 2 audits. It specifies a list of controls (e.g., firewalls, IAMs, intrusion detection systems) that your organization must implement to protect data from unauthorized access, unapproved disclosure, and malicious attacks.
• Availability: This TSC focuses on ensuring your systems and data are accessible to users when needed. It requires you to put controls in place, such as network monitoring, load balancing, and disaster recovery plans, to ensure minimized downtime and business continuity.
• Processing integrity: This criterion requires you to ensure data is processed correctly, completely, and on time, avoiding errors, omissions, damage, and unauthorized modifications. You can use controls like data validation, reconciliation, and quality checks to ensure reliable data processing.
• Confidentiality: This TSC requires you to protect information designated as sensitive or confidential (e.g., customer lists, financial records, intellectual property) by using controls to restrict access and disclosure. To ensure authorized access, you can implement measures like encryption and strict role-based access controls.
• Privacy: This criterion focuses on how personal information is collected, used, retained, disclosed, and disposed of in compliance with applicable privacy regulations and standards. You can satisfy this requirement by publishing a data usage notice, giving users options, obtaining consent, and respecting their data rights.

[Note: Security is a compulsory TSC to pass a SOC 2 audit. All other criteria are optional and can be fulfilled if your company decides to do so.]‍

Difference between SOC 2 Type 1 vs. Type 2

A SOC 2 report comes in two forms, Type 1 and Type 2: 

• Type 1: This type of audit is ideal for businesses that need to demonstrate their compliance posture at a single point in time. It evaluates the design and implementation of your organization’s security controls and processes based on the TSCs. It can be completed within weeks and is less expensive than Type 2.
• Type 2: You can choose the Type 2 audit to prove the operational effectiveness of your organization’s security controls and processes over a longer duration, usually 3-12 months. Compliance with this report requires continuous controls monitoring and testing to ensure they are working as intended. While it takes more time and is more costly, it demonstrates your ongoing commitment to robust security, improves customer credibility, and gives your business a competitive edge.

Pro tip: Although the Type 1 audit requires less time and cost, you may want to consider going directly for the Type 2 audit. It’s the more coveted of the two since it demonstrates your commitment to maintain continuous compliance with industry standards. It also assures your clients, partners, and other stakeholders that you implement highly effective security measures in your organization and that their data is safe in your hands.

What is a SOC 2 readiness assessment?

A SOC 2 readiness assessment is like a test run, where a compliance expert evaluates the strategy and execution of your internal security controls and policies against the SOC 2 TSC requirements. It helps your organization systematically prepare for the SOC 2 audit and get a satisfactory report from the auditor.

The outcomes of this pre-examination allow you to answer questions, such as: 

• Is the scope of our SOC 2 audit clearly defined?
• Are we ready for the SOC 2 audit, and positive we can clear it?
• Do our security policies and controls work effectively and comply with TSC?
• What are the compliance gaps and weaknesses we need to fix?
• How can we resolve those gaps, if any, before the audit?
• Do we have sufficient and correct evidence documentation, and is it readily available for the auditor?

You can think of it as beta testing a SaaS product. It involves an evaluation of your “system” (policies, controls, processes, documentation) in a “real-world” situation (audit simulation). It aims to identify “bugs” (compliance gaps, vulnerabilities) before the “official launch” (the actual audit).

The readiness assessment provides valuable insights from an “external party” (the assessor) into your preparedness to “go live” (proceed to the real audit) or the need to “fix bugs” (remediate control gaps) before that.

Why do you need a readiness assessment before the audit

Here’s how a SOC 2 readiness assessment benefits your audit preparation efforts: 

1. Identifies missing policies, processes, or controls

Without a clear roadmap, you risk failing the audit. The SOC 2 pre-audit evaluation helps pinpoint which policies, controls, or processes are missing. The assessor then delivers a detailed report, highlighting the gaps against the TSC requirements. This report enables you to build a targeted action plan, ensuring your compliance and audit teams remediate every weakness before the actual audit.

2. Saves money and reputation by avoiding failed or delayed audits

Jumping into a SOC 2 unprepared could cost you dearly, with expensive audit fails, exorbitant re-audit fees, and frantic remediation efforts, not to mention the stress, wasted time, and reputational damage. This is particularly true for startups and SMEs navigating their first SOC 2.

A readiness review provides a deep dive into your existing security controls to ensure you’re truly ready to face the auditor’s scrutiny and obtain a favorable SOC 2 report, preventing costly re-audits, delayed attestation, and potential fines and loss of credibility.

3. Clarifies the scope and Trust Service Criteria (TSCs)

The SOC 2 audits are not one-size-fits-all; they can be flexible depending on your business’s compliance requirements. But what if you are preparing for the out-of-scope systems or the wrong TSC?

A readiness review helps you clearly define your audit's scope – which systems, processes, and data are in and out of bounds. It also lets you pinpoint the TSCs relevant to your systems, data handling procedures, and industry requirements. This crucial step prevents wasted effort on irrelevant controls and ensures you focus on what matters to your audit's success.

4. Helps prioritize action items and timelines

Commissioning a professional assessor to perform a pre-audit review helps you pinpoint the critical gaps posing the highest risk to your audit. This allows you to create a priority-based action plan to remediate gaps with realistic timelines. By tackling the must-fix issues first, you can streamline your gap-closing efforts and avoid last-minute scrambles before the audit.

5. Assesses and improves your team’s audit maturity

A SOC 2 preparedness check enables you to answer the following question with high conviction: “Is our business truly ready for the intense inspection of a SOC 2 audit?”

A readiness review isn’t just checking items off a list; it assesses and helps enhance your team’s preparedness to face the scrutiny. The readiness assessment rigorously trains your team to consistently maintain compliance, efficiently provide evidence, and confidently respond to the auditor’s queries. 

When should you start a SOC 2 readiness assessment?

For the Type 1 report, the readiness assessment will only be effective after the initial security control design and implementation, which can take weeks to months, depending on your existing posture. Additionally, you may need 4-6 weeks to remediate the identified gaps before the audit. So, typically, you can begin the Type 1 review 3-4 months before the final audit.

The Type 2 report requires a longer timeline. Unlike Type 1, it assesses the effectiveness of your controls over an extended period—typically 3 to 12 months. This means your controls must be operating consistently for a significant duration before the readiness review even begins.

When you factor in control implementation time, evidence collection, pre-assessment, and remediation of any gaps, the entire process can easily take 6 to 12 months or more. The exact timeline depends on your current security posture, the complexity of gaps, and the compliance duration you’ve chosen for the report.

An important question to ask yourself is: “What are the signs that indicate if we’re ready for the SOC 2 pre-audit assessment?

You can proceed to the assessment if you have: 

1. Clearly defined your audit scope, targeted TSC, and audit objectives.
2. Documented your system description, including infrastructure, software, people, procedures, and data flows.
3. Implemented and mapped your core security policies and controls across relevant systems and processes.
4. Conducted an internal risk assessment to identify and evaluate risks related to the selected TSC.
5. Collected and organized evidence documents to make them readily available to the assessor.
6. Assigned roles and responsibilities for control ownership, operation, and monitoring.
7. A reasonable degree of faith that your controls work as intended to meet the TSC.

SOC 2 readiness assessment: What it includes

Now that you have an adequate understanding of the what, why, and when of the SOC 2 readiness assessment, let’s discuss the most crucial part, the various checks involved in this process: 

• Policy and control review: This is where the assessor dives deep into your security posture. They conduct a thorough evaluation of your existing policies and controls, examining both their design and how effectively they’ve been implemented in practice. Their goal is to uncover missing links or hidden anomalies, ultimately handing you a detailed blueprint to ace your SOC 2 audit. With this detailed roadmap, you can quickly catch up to unmet SOC 2 requirements and minimize the risk of potential audit delays and failures.
• Mapping current controls to TSC: Next up, they carefully map your current controls against the SOC 2 TSC to determine if you’ve put the right controls in place for each selected TSC. This step involves a thorough examination of your policies, procedures, and supporting documentation to ensure they speak the same language as the SOC 2 requirements.
• Risk assessment: This is where they put your organization’s threat radar to the test. They dig into whether you take risks seriously and have a proactive risk management program. They scrutinize whether you continuously monitor the threat landscape to identify potential business risks and how you mitigate them before they wreak havoc on your systems and data.
• Evidence readiness check: The SOC 2 expert also meticulously examines every piece of compliance evidence and documentation. They determine if your documents are authentic, accurate, and up to date.

The ultimate SOC 2 readiness checklist

Skipping the readiness assessment checklist can lead to wasted resources, hefty re-review fees, delayed gap discoveries, significant rework, and a lack of confidence in your ability to pass the audit.

Here’s a preview of the readiness checklist for you: 

Step 1: Define the scope and systems in scope

Clearly define the audit’s boundaries—specific products/services, business units, and business systems that are in scope—to align security controls, compliance workflows, and audit preparation with relevant TSCs and obtain the right attestation.

Step 2: Identify applicable TSC

Identify which TSCs are relevant to your industry and specific compliance requirements. While the security TSC is mandatory, you’ll need to strategically decide which other TSCs are required. For instance, if you serve healthcare providers, it would be a good idea to opt for the privacy and confidentiality TSCs.

Step 3: Review security policies and procedures

Assess your existing security policies and procedures to ensure they’re up-to-date, comprehensive, and aligned with SOC 2 requirements. This is where you tune up your policies, ensuring your security protocols are relevant and audit-ready.

Step 4: Conduct internal risk assessment

Thoroughly assess your existing security controls to identify any risks of not satisfying the TSC requirements and resolve vulnerabilities before they become critical threats.

Step 5: Implement and validate key controls

Put your security strategies into action by implementing essential controls, such as access controls, firewalls, incident response playbooks, and disaster recovery schemes. Confirm that your controls actually work, ideally by automating their continuous monitoring and testing. The auditor won’t take your word as final; you must prove it’s functional.

Step 6: Assign roles and responsibilities

Clearly allocate security roles across your organization, from GRC to HR to individual employees, to ensure everyone understands their part in SOC 2 performance. Ensure that senior leadership is actively involved in the process.

Step 7: Set up evidence collection workflows

Leverage software platforms that integrate with your business systems to automatically collect and centralize your evidence documentation and share it with the assessor from a single place.

Step 8: Choose an audit partner

Select an external SOC 2 expert to act as your evaluator, considering their expertise, industry experience, and availability to ensure a smooth pre-audit review.

Step 9: Create documentation templates

Use compliance audit software to gain access to pre-built templates for policies, evidence, and audit reports, ensuring accuracy, comprehensiveness, and consistency. Present a clear and organized picture of your security posture.

Step 10: Schedule a mock audit or internal review

Conduct a practice run of the audit, either internally or with an external consultant, to identify missing controls, security vulnerabilities, and compliance gaps. Anticipate exactly what could go wrong before the actual audit and prevent it from happening.

‍

Download the SOC 2 audit checklist below: 

Conclusion

Kudos to you and your team if you achieve a positive SOC 2 report on the first go. But it’s not the end of your security and compliance efforts.

SOC 2 compliance requires maintaining a strong security posture throughout the year, as you must renew your attestation annually with an audit. That’s why continuous audit readiness is imperative. You must update policies, controls, and evidence annually to meet evolving SOC 2 requirements and maintain compliance.

As your business grows, you form new alliances, commission new vendors, and recruit new personnel. This requires you to identify control gaps and remediate them on an ongoing basis by implementing new controls and adjusting existing ones.

Conducting a pre-audit review with a SOC 2 readiness assessment checklist can help your team save a significant amount of effort every year.

Download Scrut’s comprehensive SOC 2 readiness checklist today, or schedule a demo with us to get expert support on SOC 2 audits and more.