Achieving SOC 2 certification is a resource-intensive process, especially for companies with limited or no dedicated security personnel. In many cases, businesses rely on a small team—or even a single security expert—to manage the entire security and IT environments, including preparation for the audit to maintaining controls afterward.
Without an automation platform, compliance becomes a manual, time-consuming burden, requiring key personnel to juggle evidence collection, policy management, and security monitoring. Keeping compliance ongoing after the audit is even more challenging, as there’s little visibility into control ownership—making it difficult to ensure everything remains in place for the next audit. This lack of oversight can lead to compliance gaps, requiring even more effort to fix when the next assessment comes around.
Managing compliance internally requires substantial effort and expertise. Common challenges include:
These tasks demand significant time and effort, often pulling key personnel away from their primary responsibilities. Without automation, companies risk slowing down innovation, increasing costs, and making compliance far more difficult than it needs to be.
By leveraging compliance automation tools such as Vanta, Drata, SecureFrame, Carbide, and others, businesses can streamline the compliance journey while reducing operational overhead. Here’s how these platforms add value:
Compliance automation platforms integrate with cloud providers, HR systems, and security tools to automatically gather compliance evidence in real time. This ensures accuracy and prevents gaps or exceptions in reports, which is critical for frameworks like SOC 2 Type 2 that require continuous monitoring.
Without automation, evidence collection is a manual and time-consuming process, requiring employees to constantly track and document security controls, access logs, infrastructure changes, and operational procedures. This increases the likelihood of human error, missing documentation, and outdated records, which can lead to audit delays, compliance failures, or even costly re-audits.
Additionally, many organizations attempt to build in-house compliance automation, but these solutions are often difficult to maintain and update as security policies, infrastructure, scope and compliance requirements evolve. Changes in cloud configurations, employee onboarding processes, or software updates can break in-house systems, leading to unnoticed compliance gaps. Without robust monitoring, businesses might not realize issues until an audit, putting their certification at risk.
Managing compliance across multiple teams and stakeholders can quickly become overwhelming without a centralized system. Compliance automation platforms offer a single, unified dashboard where businesses can easily track their compliance status in real time. This makes managing security policies, gathering evidence, and maintaining controls much more efficient.
A centralized compliance platform solves these problems by offering:
Modern compliance platforms offer extensive integration capabilities with:
Compliance automation platforms reduce costs by eliminating manual processes and allowing businesses to focus internal resources on core operations instead of compliance administration.
Automation and specialized services accelerate certification, often cutting traditional timelines in half.
Continuous monitoring ensures security controls are always functioning, allowing businesses to proactively address compliance gaps in real time.
Continuous monitoring strengthens overall security posture while reducing administrative burden.
Automation platforms provide auditors direct access to evidence, progress tracking, and communication tools, eliminating delays and miscommunication.
If SOC 2 is your primary compliance goal, investing in a compliance automation platform and outsourcing to an MSSP is the most efficient way to achieve certification without disrupting business operations. By leveraging specialized expertise and automation, businesses can meet compliance requirements without diverting key resources from primary responsibilities.