As a growing number of firms adopt the cloud as a part of their systems, SOC 2 compliance becomes a critical factor. Specifically, any service provider that stores customers’ data in the cloud must comply with Soc 2 to maintain these control environments. To bring a higher level of security to these systems, SOC 2 was enacted.
Naturally, to ensure compliance standards, SOC 2 Audit Firms have extended their services to help. But to achieve compliance, what do firms need to keep in mind? That’s what this article is about.
Monitoring
Achieving SOC 2 compliance is more than just being aware of the need for system security. It’s vigilance in maintaining the processes and practices of oversight across the network of an organization. Specifically, monitoring is done to watch for unusual system activity, configuration changes, and user access levels.
Anomaly Alerts
Today’s threat landscape is continually changing. Despite this, it’s imperative that, when a security event happens—and it most likely will, there are adequate alert procedures in place to make sure that unauthorized persons do not access customer data. The ability to respond to these threats and take corrective action must be paramount.
In many cases, what most consider to be alerting procedures are just many alerts coming from false positives. For this reason, a system must sound an alarm only when an activity diverts from the norm as it has been defined as being unauthorized by the network.
Audit Trails Detailed
When it comes to a response to a threat, everyone must understand the root cause. Without this contextual insight, anyone responsible for maintaining a system will be unable to remediate the issue when it comes about. Having an audit trail will provide a method to inspect your security operations. This will give the responsible parties the who, what, where, why, and when of how a security incident happened and how to fix and prevent it in the future.
Taking Correction Action
When a suspicious activity takes place on a system, what happens? In many cases, not nearly enough. Customers should be assured that when suspicious activity occurs, and real-time alerts happen, corrective action occurs. Further, these corrective actions should begin long before a system-wide situation occurs that exposes and compromises customer data.
Administrators should be obsessive about tracking and finding security incidents and minimizing the time it takes to secure remediation. Corrective actions can only be as good as the intelligence they are based on, so there must be enough data to make an informed decision.
Armed with this data and the methods that make this information available, administrators can better detect threats, mitigate the impact, and put corrective measures in place. This will also make the system more sensitive when incidents happen again in the future.
In a Nutshell
SOC 2 is all about putting well-defined policies and practices in place that will better prevent security incidents. It is much more than just forming lists with checkboxes. Having these methods in place will help to build trust with customers and others that your systems are secure in the cloud. Other mandates, such as SOC 1, were a good start, but SOC 2 makes an on-going system necessary for compliance, which will help ensure a business’s success.
