Service Organization Control (SOC) compliance is a voluntary compliance framework created by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) to help financial institutions better manage security, risk and data management. Over time, several different audits and reports based on SOC have emerged, the most popular of which is SOC 2.

The SOC 2 audit process is a comprehensive assessment that demonstrates an organization’s commitment to security and data privacy. Many organizations pick up SOC 2 certification specifically to raise the security profile of their brands and encourage trust from users and clients.

While that seems straightforward, the fact is that SOC 2 can be a long, rigorous and challenging audit that takes months to years to complete. Additionally, once you’ve achieved SOC 2 certification, you must continually demonstrate your continued compliance annually.

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Understanding the structure of a SOC 2 report is essential for both businesses and service providers who are thinking ahead to their audit and attestation. It will serve as the “story” of an organization’s SOC 2 journey, covering the evaluation of their adherence to the Trust Services Criteria (TSC)–security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. 

In this blog post, we will provide an overview of the standard structure of a SOC 2 report, encompassing its various sections and the information included in each of these segments. 

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What is a SOC 2 Report?

Introduced in 2011, Service Organization Control (SOC) reports are becoming more and more popular in data security and compliance discussions with every passing year, especially SOC 2. But what is a SOC report? Which one do you need? Why is a SOC 2 report so important?

There are three types of SOC reports, which are “designed for the growing number of technology and cloud computing entities that are becoming very common in the world of service organizations,” according to ssae16.org. If a SOC 1 report handles the financial transactions a company makes, SOC 2 reports on the security behind those financial transactions, making it more relevant than ever in the growing wake of credit card fraud and data breaches.

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