Achieving SOC 2 certification is a significant milestone for any business that stores and processes customer data, such as SaaS providers, healthcare, and financial service providers. At its heart, it requires demonstrating that you’re securely managing all your customer data.

This standard is suitable for a wide range of business types. The downside to being broad in applicability is that it doesn’t give businesses a prescriptive formula or checklist for SOC 2 compliance.

It is made up of five trust criteria (privacy, confidentiality, availability, security, and processing integrity), which form the foundation of any assessment. This is where the challenge lies: how do you demonstrate that your controls are appropriate across the relevant SOC 2 trust criteria, especially when the standard isn’t prescriptive about what is required?

For example, if Theta (Glasstrail’s parent company) were to get SOC 2 compliance, we’d probably focus on security, availability, and confidentiality – and then of course demonstrate that our controls meet these trust criteria.
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The visibility challenge under SOC 2

Unlike ISO standards, those wanting to achieve and maintain their SOC 2 accreditation must demonstrate appropriate security controls from the outset. Without a doubt, assessing and monitoring risks and vulnerabilities across a large estate of internet-facing assets is daunting for business that processes data.

Key questions arise, such as “How can I know what account passwords have been breached” and “How certain are we that there aren’t internet-facing assets that were supposed to be closed down years ago?”.

Traditionally, IT teams have been reactive in this space: tracking assets in spreadsheets or documents. Often, they’ve taken the view that the impact of a password breach or discovery of an open port is so unlikely that there is no need to proactively hunt out these risks.

SOC 2 accreditation changes this. And it is timely too, with Chat GPT-driven cyber-attacks becoming more likely. The tide has turned, and IT teams now need to proactively measure and monitor their controls – and demonstrating this is a key part of SOC 2 compliance.
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Measuring your auditable security controls with Glasstrail

Monitoring your external attack surface for vulnerabilities and risks is useful when demonstrating how well you manage your data security across security, availability, and confidentiality. Tools like Glasstrail search for gaps in your systems and find information available publicly on the internet that bad actors could use against you.

Combining Glasstrail with other tools like point-in-time penetration tests, will give you a deeper understanding of where your remediation efforts should be focused. It helps to assess the effectiveness of your security controls and identify areas for improvement.
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Key benefits of using Glasstrail for SOC 2 compliance

Glasstrail measures how well your security controls are performing:

• Accuracy: Maintains an accurate database of all internet-facing assets. This means that you’ll always have the complete picture of all your external facing assets. 
• Visibility: Identifies urgent risks and issues that need resolution.
• What gets measured gets managed: Monitors your improving external attack surface risks. This means that you'll be able to easily show how you're improving your risk profile.
• Speed: Provides auditable results quickly and downloadable reports that demonstrate the effectiveness of your security controls.

Getting and maintaining SOC 2 certification requires an in-depth understanding of how well you manage your security– including your external attack surface. With Glasstrail, businesses can identify and track vulnerabilities over time in their external attack surface. Ideally, annual SOC 2 assessments would want to see monitoring is in place along with a progressive reduction in high-priority risks in the attack surface.

Discover how easy it is to get started with a Glasstrail scan and use it for SOC 2 audits. The scan does the hard work of finding all your subdomains from just one root domain, then identifies risks and vulnerabilities like email, web, domain security issues along with misconfigured ports and neglected subdomains. Give it a try today – it's free for 14 days!