Your First SOC 2 Audit: A Complete Roadmap for SaaS Companies

Most SaaS companies encounter SOC 2 for the first time when a prospect's security questionnaire lands in the founder's inbox. The deal is significant, the timeline is tight, and suddenly compliance becomes a board-level priority. If that scenario sounds familiar, this roadmap will help you navigate from zero to certified without the costly missteps we see teams make repeatedly.

After guiding hundreds of SaaS companies through their first SOC 2 engagement, we have identified a repeatable sequence that minimizes disruption, controls cost, and produces a report that actually accelerates sales cycles.

Understanding SOC 2 Scope and Trust Service Criteria

Before writing a single policy, you need to define what is in scope. SOC 2 is built around five Trust Service Criteria: Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. Every company must include Security (the Common Criteria), but the remaining four are optional and should be selected based on your product, your customers, and the data you process.

For most B2B SaaS companies processing non-health, non-financial data, starting with Security and Availability provides the strongest signal to buyers without overextending your control environment. Adding Confidentiality makes sense if you handle sensitive client IP. Privacy is typically relevant only if you process consumer PII on behalf of customers.

Scoping also means defining system boundaries. Your SOC 2 report covers a specific system, not your entire company. Clearly delineating which infrastructure, applications, personnel, and third-party services fall within scope prevents audit creep and keeps remediation efforts focused.

A common mistake at this stage is over-scoping. Including staging environments, internal tools, or legacy systems that do not touch customer data adds weeks of work with no incremental value to your report. Work with your auditor to draw tight, defensible boundaries.

The Readiness Assessment: Finding and Prioritizing Gaps

With scope defined, the next step is a structured gap assessment against the SOC 2 criteria you have selected. This is not a checkbox exercise. A quality readiness assessment produces three deliverables: a gap inventory ranked by severity, a remediation plan with owners and deadlines, and a realistic timeline to audit readiness.

We typically categorize gaps into three tiers. Critical gaps are missing controls that would result in exceptions on your report, such as the absence of an access review process or no incident response plan. Moderate gaps are controls that exist informally but lack documentation or consistent execution, like change management procedures that engineers follow but nobody has written down. Minor gaps are documentation or evidence gaps that are straightforward to close, such as updating an asset inventory or formalizing a vendor assessment template.

For a typical Series A or Series B SaaS company, the readiness assessment reveals 15 to 30 gaps. Roughly 20 percent are critical, 50 percent are moderate, and 30 percent are minor. The critical gaps should be remediated first, as they represent the longest lead times and often require tooling changes or process implementation.

Budget four to eight weeks for the readiness assessment and remediation planning phase. Rushing this stage is the single most common cause of delayed audits and qualified reports.

Building Your Control Environment

Remediation is where the real work happens. You are building the operational foundation that the auditor will evaluate, and that your team will maintain for years. Approach it as infrastructure, not a one-time project.

Start with policies. You need a core set that includes an Information Security Policy, Access Control Policy, Change Management Policy, Incident Response Plan, Risk Assessment Methodology, and Vendor Management Policy. These are living documents, not shelf-ware. Write them to reflect how your team actually operates, then adjust operations where necessary to meet the criteria.

Next, implement the technical controls. For most SaaS companies, this means enabling multi-factor authentication across all production systems, implementing centralized logging with a minimum 90-day retention period, establishing automated vulnerability scanning on a defined cadence, configuring infrastructure-as-code with peer-reviewed pull requests for all production changes, and deploying endpoint detection and response on all company devices.

The final layer is operational process. This includes quarterly access reviews, annual risk assessments, tabletop incident response exercises, and ongoing vendor due diligence. These recurring activities generate the evidence your auditor needs during the observation window.

One principle we emphasize with every client: automate evidence collection from day one. If your access reviews require someone to manually export spreadsheets every quarter, the process will eventually break down. Integrate your GRC platform with your identity provider, cloud infrastructure, and ticketing systems so evidence is captured continuously.

The Audit Window and What to Expect

SOC 2 Type II audits observe your controls over a period of time, typically six to twelve months. The audit itself is not a single event but a sustained period during which your controls must operate effectively.

During the observation window, your auditor will request evidence at defined intervals. They are looking for consistent execution, not perfection. A single missed access review is unlikely to result in an exception, but a pattern of missed reviews will.

Common evidence requests include population lists for user access, change management tickets for production deployments, vulnerability scan results and remediation timelines, incident logs and response documentation, and vendor assessment records.

At the conclusion of the observation period, the auditor compiles their findings into the SOC 2 report. This includes a description of your system, management's assertion, the auditor's opinion, and any exceptions identified. A clean report, one with no exceptions, is the goal but not strictly required. Minor exceptions with documented remediation plans are common and generally acceptable to enterprise buyers.

Plan for the audit window to begin no earlier than 30 days after your remediation is complete. Your controls need time to generate evidence, and your team needs time to operationalize new processes before the auditor starts evaluating them.

Key Takeaways

• Start by defining scope tightly: include only the systems, people, and services that directly support your product and customer data processing.
• Invest adequate time in the readiness assessment phase, as rushing gap identification leads to surprises during the audit window.
• Build your control environment as permanent operational infrastructure, not a one-time project to pass an audit.
• Automate evidence collection from the beginning to reduce ongoing burden and improve consistency.
• Expect the full timeline from kickoff to report delivery to span eight to fourteen months for a first-time SOC 2 Type II engagement.

FAQ

How much does a first SOC 2 Type II audit cost?

Total cost varies based on scope, company size, and existing security maturity. For a typical SaaS company with 50 to 200 employees, expect to budget between $50,000 and $150,000 all-in for the first year, including readiness consulting, GRC tooling, and audit fees. Subsequent years are typically 40 to 60 percent less as the foundational work is already in place.

Should we start with SOC 2 Type I or go directly to Type II?

We generally recommend going directly to Type II unless you have an urgent deal that requires a report within 90 days. Type I reports evaluate controls at a point in time and carry less weight with sophisticated buyers. Starting with Type I adds cost and extends your overall timeline to getting the Type II report that enterprise customers actually want to see.

How long does the entire process take from start to finish?

For a first-time engagement, plan for eight to fourteen months from project kickoff to receiving your final report. This includes four to eight weeks for readiness assessment, four to twelve weeks for remediation, six to twelve months for the observation window, and four to six weeks for report finalization. Companies with strong existing security practices can compress the readiness and remediation phases significantly.