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SOC 2 vs. SOC for Cybersecurity

Published on by Robert Ramsay in SOC Reports, Technology

SOC 2 vs. SOC for Cybersecurity

The AICPA released a nice comparison of their SOC 2 and SOC for Cybersecurity products.  With all of the concern about data security today, the two products can be valuable.  However, their titles do not explain the differences in audience, scope, purpose, or contents.  Now there is a simple, two-page summary of the two with key differences easily explained.  This is one of the better efforts of the AICPA’s marketing for SOC services.

For a more detailed comparison, see the downloadable SOC 2 and SOC for Cybersecurity comparison sheet from the AICPA’s website here.

In our experience, the SOC 2 is increasingly valuable in business to business compliance and assurance. It continues to expand in usefulness as a tool to meet other requirement standards (i.e. GDPR, HIPAA & PCI) that require detailed oversight of third-party vendors. We are seeing many businesses expand from a basic SOC 2 Security report to SOC 2 Security + HITRUST or SOC 2 Security, Availability and Confidentiality. This demonstrates that they are expanding their control environment and better protecting their responsibilities to their customers.

We are finding that the SOC for Cybersecurity is especially useful for larger enterprises that need a measurement of their own cybersecurity posture. This is meeting the need to quantify risk over time for board members who want to know if cybersecurity risks are being adequately mitigated.  It is a great way to measure whether very specific controls have improved from year to year.

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