What your developers need to know about SOC 2?

What your developers need to know about SOC 2?

SOC 2 is far more than a certificate you present during a sales call. It is a detailed set of requirements that directly shapes how your development team works every day. It influences how code is written, how changes are deployed, how access is controlled, how incidents are handled and how systems are monitored. Developers who understand SOC 2 can significantly accelerate the compliance process and help their company win larger and more demanding clients.

To understand why, it helps to look at what SOC 2 actually represents. Developed by AICPA, SOC 2 allows an independent auditor to determine whether a service provider, especially one operating in the SaaS model, processes and stores customer data securely. It covers both technical safeguards and organisational processes, as well as the overall culture of working with sensitive systems. Although SOC 2 is formally voluntary, in practice it has become an entry-level requirement in B2B. Increasingly, the absence of an up-to-date SOC 2 report eliminates a vendor from consideration before product evaluation even begins.

Because of this, SOC 2 inevitably intersects with what developers and architects do every day. They design, implement and maintain the systems and practices that auditors review, and their work becomes the primary source of evidence in the final report.

Why SOC 2 matters to your development team?

From the organisation’s perspective, SOC 2 is a set of criteria that must be satisfied company-wide. From a technical team’s viewpoint, however, the standard essentially formalises well-established engineering practices. SOC 2 expects what any mature software organisation should already have in place: a structured development process, strong access controls, automated testing, monitoring, backups and a clear approach to vulnerability management.

Developers are therefore at the center of the effort, not on the sidelines. Their decisions determine whether the application’s architecture meets SOC 2 expectations, whether logging is sufficiently detailed, whether encryption is applied correctly and whether code changes leave a consistent trace in the ticketing system and repository. In practice, SOC 2 acts as a framework that organises and documents the processes already occurring across the development lifecycle.

The five SOC 2 trust criteria explained from a developer’s perspective

SOC 2 is built on five Trust Services Criteria. Every report must include security, while the remaining categories can be selected depending on your product’s profile. Understanding these pillars helps developers turn abstract audit language into concrete engineering decisions.

The first pillar, security, covers protection against unauthorised access, both logical and physical. For the development team this involves well-defined roles and permissions, restricted access to production environments, Web Application Firewalls, intrusion detection, strong authentication and network segmentation.

The second pillar, availability, focuses on whether the system meets the uptime levels promised to customers. Ensuring this requires continuous monitoring, high-availability architecture, a sound disaster recovery strategy and well-defined incident response procedures.

The third pillar, processing integrity, examines whether data is processed completely, accurately and according to business intent. Developers address this through quality business logic, robust data validation, reliable automated tests and strong change-management practices.

The fourth pillar, confidentiality, concerns the protection of sensitive information. This translates to properly implemented encryption, restricting access to sensitive data, masking personal information in logs and ensuring tenant isolation in multi-tenant architectures.

The fifth criterion, privacy, governs the lifecycle of personal data: how it is collected, stored, processed and deleted. Developers must ensure that system behaviour aligns with the organisation’s privacy policy, including support for anonymisation, retention rules and data deletion requests.

How SOC 2 integrates into the development lifecycle?

Once these pillars are understood, the connection to the daily development lifecycle becomes clear. Auditors look not only at the system itself but at how it is built and maintained. They examine whether your SDLC is repeatable, traceable and consistently followed.

In an effective SDLC, every change is linked to a ticket in a system such as Jira. All code resides in a repository governed by branch-protection rules, with mandatory reviews. The CI pipeline runs automated tests, and deployments follow a documented procedure rather than relying on manual server access. Production environments are locked down and are not modified by ad-hoc SSH sessions.

SOC 2 does not require a reinvention of your SDLC, but it demands consistency and documented evidence. Repository history, ticket records, CI/CD logs and test reports all serve as proof that the process operates reliably over time.

Core technical foundations: access control, encryption and monitoring

One of the first areas auditors examine is access control. They expect clear procedures for granting and revoking access and want to see that privileges for sensitive systems are tightly restricted. Developers often work closely with infrastructure teams to ensure roles are properly designed and service accounts only receive the minimum permissions needed.

Data encryption is another major requirement. Both data at rest and in transit must be encrypted. That means enabling disk encryption on databases and object storage, enforcing HTTPS, managing certificates properly and, if using custom encryption mechanisms, securing keys and applying strong algorithms correctly.

Equally important is monitoring and logging. An application should produce metrics around performance, errors and availability, along with logs that allow incident reconstruction. Development teams design log formats so they are both useful for debugging and safe from exposing sensitive information. Meanwhile, alerts and dashboards ensure issues are detected quickly.

Finally, SOC 2 expects robust backups and disaster recovery capabilities. It is not enough to generate backups regularly; you must demonstrate that restoration works. Recovery tests therefore become a standard part of the process.

Treating vulnerability management as a continuous discipline

SOC 2 assumes organisations take vulnerabilities seriously and have structured processes to handle them. Developers play a central role here as well.

A practical approach involves providing a clear reporting channel for vulnerabilities and integrating SAST, DAST and dependency scanning into CI/CD. Detected issues are logged, prioritised and addressed through normal development workflows. Crucially, they are not allowed to linger unresolved. A complete record is kept so auditors can verify when a vulnerability was found, how it was classified, when it was fixed and how the fix was validated. Larger incidents often include concise post-incident summaries to demonstrate organisational maturity.

Type I vs. Type II: what it means for developers

SOC 2 reports come in two versions: Type I and Type II. This distinction significantly affects what is required from the technical team.

A Type I report is a snapshot. It verifies that controls are designed and implemented correctly on a specific date.

A Type II report tracks performance over time. It requires demonstrating that controls functioned effectively over a defined period, usually six to twelve months. As a result, Type II demands consistency: every deployment, permission change, vulnerability fix and incident becomes part of the historical evidence.

Although more challenging, Type II carries greater weight in enterprise procurement processes, making it the preferred choice for many SaaS providers.

Timeline to SOC 2 and where developers can accelerate the process

Achieving SOC 2 compliance typically involves several stages. The journey begins with a gap analysis comparing current processes, architecture, access controls and documentation to SOC 2 expectations. Depending on maturity, this can take weeks or months.

The next step is implementing missing controls. Here developers can make the biggest impact: by improving repository practices, enforcing consistent branching strategies, enabling required code reviews, strengthening CI automations, integrating monitoring tools and tightening cloud permissions. Once these practices become standard operating procedure, SOC 2 stops feeling like an additional burden.

Afterwards comes the evidence-collection period, particularly important for Type II. The organisation must demonstrate that the system operated in alignment with its controls over several consecutive months. The final stage is the audit itself, where the auditor reviews documentation, logs, tickets and speaks with key personnel, including developers and infrastructure engineers.

All told, end-to-end SOC 2 readiness often takes six to eighteen months. However, most of the required work directly improves system stability, predictability and security, making SOC 2 a practical investment rather than an administrative task.

Building a SOC 2 mindset within the development team

Ultimately, SOC 2 should be treated not as a one-time project but as a durable approach to engineering. For developers this mindset includes several essential elements.

First, work must be evidence-driven. Every meaningful action leaves a trace: a ticket, a commit, a pipeline log or an incident record.

Second, security becomes the default. Permissions are minimised, production access is controlled, encryption is always on and logs are structured with incident response in mind.

Third, responsibility is shared across the organisation. SOC 2 is not solely the domain of compliance or security teams. Developers, DevOps engineers, security specialists, managers and HR all contribute to a cohesive system that supports these requirements.

When this mindset takes hold, the SOC 2 report becomes more than a compliance requirement. It becomes a formal confirmation that the organisation builds software with maturity and discipline and is confident enough to allow its practices to be independently verified.