What is a SOC 2 Readiness Assessment?

Readiness assessments become a crucial part of the SOC 2 compliance journey. Organizations will leverage either in-house auditors or external third-party firms to validate internal controls, remediation plans, and incident response plans. 

These assessments help organizations create a gap analysis to remediate areas of concern before the actual SOC 2 auditors begin their engagement. 

Compliance documentation hygiene is a critical piece of SOC 2 compliance. Auditors pay particular attention to an organization's ability to stay current with SOC 2 compliance changes, as well as its ability to update various policies and documentation. 

Tiebreaker AI's compliance automation platform provides functionality to help prepare for SOC 2. Their ability to use AI to review your firm's compliance policies with the latest changes to SOC 2 is a time and cost-saving value. 

Key Components of a SOC 2 Self-Assessment 

Organizations preparing for their internal self-readiness assessments need to organize the collection of artifacts that align with the SOC 2 compliance review. The internal auditors or third-party firms will validate these artifacts. 

• Documentation supporting the need for SOC 2 compliance for the business 

• Executive summary of expectations for reaching SOC 2 compliance 

• Change management documentation for all relevant cybersecurity controls, procedures, and security policies 

• Executive summary reviewing the previous gap assessment and completed remediation. 

A good portion of these artifacts should become automated, leveraging the Tiebreaker AI platform. 

Leveraging AI automation will help keep many artifacts up to date, even when SOC 2 compliance requirements change. This automated documentation review process will reduce the time required to prepare for the actual SOC 2 compliance audit, which a certified AICPA auditor completes. 

Evaluating Existing Controls for the Initial Readiness Assessment 

Businesses that have deployed cybersecurity defense tools to protect their digital assets and mitigate potential risks need to validate their security posture regularly. Most organizations that deploy complex security tools, including advanced email security and zero-trust architecture, struggle to maintain the highest state of readiness for these capabilities. 

An internal readiness assessment becomes a critical component to help the organization realize the risk of failing to maintain these existing controls, supporting documentation, and procedures. 

Analyzing Policies and Procedures Supporting the Formal Readiness Assessment 

Along with validating internal security controls, businesses need to ensure that the supporting documentation and policies are also updated and maintained. External auditors rely on the organization's supporting documentation and policies to validate whether they have the means to protect data and sustain the constant changes to mandates and technical controls. 

If an organization has retired a specific protective control but failed to update the documentation and policy artifacts, this will give a false expectation to the organization's leadership and external auditors. 

Conducting regular analysis of various policies and supporting SOC 2 documentation helps detect these issues. This early warning allows organizations to remediate documentation hygiene before the following internal or external assessment. 

Automated Tools and Platforms for Readiness Assessment 

SOC 2 compliance mandates change annually. Organizations that want to sustain their certification status need to adopt these changes to their security posture strategy. A significant component of this updating centers on documentation hygiene. AI compliance automation tools help replace several manual workflows related to documentation hygiene, including reviewing updated SOC 2 mandate changes against the organization's current documents. 

This manual review process is time-consuming and prone to errors. Leveraging AI compliance automation from Tiebreaker AI, businesses will receive actionable insights and recommendations to help update various documents based on SOC 2 changes. 

Along with documentation change recommendations, Tiebreaker AI also provides a centralized collaboration portal that all shareholders can access. This portal, along with the content uploaded, remains secure. 

Why Tiebreaker AI? 

Experience, innovation, expertise, and cost-effectiveness - this is Tiebreaker AI. Companies look towards Tiebreaker AI to help provide an intelligent and automated way to keep their compliance document current and secure. 

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