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u/Alarmed_Ferret_5640

▲ 1 r/auditing

What’s the hardest part of a first SOC 2 audit: writing policies or collecting evidence?

I’ve been talking to founders, security leaders, and compliance teams preparing for their first SOC 2 audit, and one theme comes up over and over:

>

Most teams start out confident:

  • Policies are documented
  • Controls are defined
  • Vendors are reviewed
  • Security tools are in place

Then the auditor asks:

>

That’s when the scramble begins.

Evidence ends up scattered across:

  • Google Drive
  • Jira
  • Slack
  • Notion
  • Email
  • Shared folders
  • Vendor portals

At that point, the biggest control gap is often the compliance process itself.

I’m curious:

  1. What was the most challenging part of your first SOC 2 audit?
  2. What types of evidence were hardest to gather?
  3. If you could change one thing about your audit prep process, what would it be?

Would love to hear lessons learned from auditors, consultants, and internal compliance teams.

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u/Alarmed_Ferret_5640 — 3 days ago
▲ 1 r/auditing

Been going through SOC 2 recently and noticed something:

Most teams don’t fail because controls are missing —

they fail because they can’t prove them.

In a lot of audits I’ve seen (or read about):

- controls exist, but there’s no consistent evidence

- nothing proves controls operate over time

- no clear link between risk → control → evidence

So the work is real… but invisible to the auditor.

Curious if this matches what others here are seeing?

What’s been harder in your experience —

figuring out what to fix, or proving that it works?

u/Alarmed_Ferret_5640 — 26 days ago