SOC 2 for startups: a practical compliance checklist

Why this isn't just a paperwork exercise

SOC 2 has real technical substance behind the audit checklist: how customer data is stored, who can access it, how changes to production are controlled, and whether the company can actually prove any of that when asked.

Basic checklist

• Do you know exactly what customer data the system collects, and where each piece is stored?
• Is access to production restricted to who actually needs it, and is that access logged?
• Is sensitive data encrypted at rest and in transit?
• Is there a documented process for granting and revoking employee access when someone joins or leaves?
• Are changes to production going through code review and a deploy process, not a direct manual change?
• Is there a tested backup, not just a configured one nobody has verified?
• Is there an incident response plan, even a simple one, for the case of a breach?
• Do you have logging and monitoring that would actually show you an attack in progress?

The most common mistake

Treating SOC 2 as a document exercise handled entirely by whoever is writing policies, with no real change in how the system handles data or access behind it. That doesn't survive a real audit, let alone a real incident.

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