Why is it important?

Ensuring effective risk management is vital for your business’s smooth operation and success and for maintaining security and compliance with standards such as ISO, SOC, NIST, and many more. Automated risk management can efficiently handle the complexity of risk management processes, saving time and reducing human errors.

What is compliance risk management?

Compliance risk management refers to identifying, assessing, and controlling the potential risks associated with non-compliance with laws, regulations, standards, and policies applicable to a particular business or industry. While true for multiple operational aspects, managing cybersecurity risks is one of the most challenging and evolving fields of Risk Management. The goal of compliance risk management in this respect is to ensure that an organization operates within boundaries minimizing the potential for negative information security and privacy consequences. A compliance risk management policy should be integrated into an organization’s overall risk management framework to ensure it is aligned with its strategic goals and objectives.

What are the main steps in risk management?

1. Risk Identification
   The initial step in effective risk management is identifying which risks apply to your business. It involves considering both business and IT assets, threats, and vulnerabilities. In essence, risk
   can be defined as the possibility of harm occurring when a threat exploits a vulnerability. Alternatively, risk can be viewed as the point at which assets, threats, and vulnerabilities intersect.
2. Risk Analysis/Assessment/Evaluation
   Once risks have been identified, the next crucial step in your compliance risk management plan is to conduct a comprehensive analysis, measuring, assessment, or scoring of each of the identified risks. This involves giving meaning to each risk, taking into account factors such as the likelihood and impact of the risk, the expected loss in the event of the risk happening, and the probability of the risk. By analyzing these factors, we can define the characteristics of each risk and produce a risk “bottom line,” such as a score, number, or price. This information serves as crucial input for the risk management expert in making informed decisions and taking appropriate actions in the next step. Different analytical methods can be applied, including qualitative or quantitative risk analysis, which we’ll delve into in the next post, where I’ll explain the differences and guide you on how to perform a thorough cyber risk analysis.
3. Risk Treatment
   Once the risks have been identified, analyzed, and fully comprehended, it’s time to take action – this is where risk treatment comes into play. Here are the available options for each risk:
   • Avoid – This approach involves eliminating the risk and for instance, modifying your plans or implementation to eliminate the likelihood or impact of the risk. This means there will be no risk whatsoever.
   • Mitigate (reduce) – This method entails taking action to reduce the likelihood or impact of the risk. One effective method is defining and monitoring security controls. Accept – By choosing to accept you acknowledge that the risk can happen and do nothing to prevent it. You may wonder when this would be advisable. An instance is when mitigating the risk is too expensive compared to the likelihood, impact, and loss expectancy, as deduced from the comprehensive risk analysis you carried out earlier.
   • Transfer – In this approach, you transfer the risk to a third party.
4. Continuous Risk Monitoring
   Effective risk management is an ongoing and dynamic process that demands consistent attention. Once risks have been reduced through the implementation of mitigation strategies and controls, it becomes imperative to monitor them regularly. To achieve this, updating the risk, registering, and testing the effectiveness of processes should be a regular practice.
   
   

This article provides an overview of the key steps involved in risk management for businesses. The initial step is to identify risks that are relevant to the business, considering both business and IT assets, threats, and vulnerabilities. Once risks have been identified, a comprehensive analysis should be conducted, measuring factors such as the likelihood and impact of the risk. The next step is risk treatment, where available options include avoiding the risk, reducing the likelihood or impact, accepting the risk, or transferring it to a third party. Finally, ongoing risk monitoring is crucial to ensure that risk management remains effective and dynamic. We emphasize the importance of effective risk management for business success, security, and compliance with industry standards.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the above, please feel free to contact us.

As a new market phenomenon, this category has multiple names.
Enterprises see it as an enhancement to existing GRC tools; Gartner has started toying with the name CCA (Continuous Compliance Automation), while others use CAT (Compliance Automation Tools) as an acronym.

We at Cypago, one of the first vendors to provide a holistic platform to automate and manage all compliance needs, simply call it Compliance Automation.

But what are the benefits of such tools, and why should a CISO or a GRC expert care about them? Why should a security compliance expert abandon the manual yet trusted and familiar way of running compliance processes and switch to an automated solution?

Let’s discuss what compliance means in today’s digital markets and why you should care about automating your security compliance.

Increasing demand for compliance

As more and more companies are embracing digital transformation and moving additional workloads to the cloud, data security is becoming a crucial factor in protecting sensitive information. In the last 12 months only, we’ve witnessed a series of events, such as the ones reported by Okta, LastPass, CircleCI, and many others, highlighting how customers’ data is at an all-time high risk of exposure, mishandling, and misuse. In turn, it created a massive spike in customers’ demand that their service providers and vendors prove compliance with security and privacy frameworks.

Although security doesn’t always equal compliance, security compliance automation tools can be a powerful solution for ensuring that your organization meets industry standards and complies with regulatory requirements.

 

Why should you be using compliance automation?

Here are some key benefits of using a security compliance automation tool.

1. Reducing the Risk of Human Error
   Mistakes can happen, but even a tiny error can have significant consequences regarding security and compliance. Compliance automation tools help to reduce the risk of human error by automating many of the manual processes involved in compliance management. As a result, organizations can spend less time worrying about compliance and focusing more on their core business objectives.
2. Ensuring Consistency
   Compliance requirements can vary widely depending on the industry and regulatory bodies involved. Compliance automation tools help ensure that your organization consistently meets these requirements over time and across regions or product lines, reducing the risk of non-compliance and potential penalties.
3. Saving Time and Resources
   Managing compliance can be a complex and time-consuming process. Compliance automation tools streamline many tasks involved in compliance management, such as documentation, evidence collection, data analysis, and reporting. This helps reduce the time and resources required for compliance management, allowing your organization to focus on other priorities.
   
4. Enhancing Security
   A security compliance automation tool can enhance your organization’s security posture by identifying and addressing system and process risks. An effective tool will assess the requirements made by the applicable security frameworks and highlight, on an ongoing basis, all the outstanding compliance gaps. Therefore, automated compliance testing can help to identify potential security risks, and automated remediation processes can help to resolve these issues quickly.
5. Keeping Up with Regulatory Changes
   Regulatory requirements can change rapidly, making it challenging for organizations to keep up. Compliance automation tools can help to ensure that your organization stays up-to-date with the latest regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of non-compliance and potential penalties.
6. Providing Greater Visibility and Control
   Compliance automation tools provide greater visibility and control over your organization’s compliance posture. Automated reporting and monitoring tools provide real-time insights into your compliance status, allowing you to identify and address any issues that arise quickly. With in-depth visibility, the ability to share insights with stakeholders and management becomes a more straightforward and actionable task.
7. Demonstrating Compliance to Auditors
   Compliance audits can be stressful and time-consuming processes. Compliance automation tools simplify the process by providing a centralized repository of compliance-related documentation and evidence. In addition, auditors can leverage the tool just like the end user, only they will review evidence, validate it, and share feedback with the end user. This way, communication is made more accessible, reducing the time and resources required for audits.

 

Embrace change, earn efficiency

As described, using a security compliance automation tool can be a game-changer for your organization. By reducing the risk of human error, ensuring consistency, saving time and resources, and providing greater visibility and control, these tools can help your organization achieve and maintain compliance while focusing on your core business objectives.

Yet it’s a change in how compliance is done today. As such, it calls for an open mind and readiness for disruption. Take screenshots, for example – this manual habit is no longer required when leveraging automatic evidence collection and analysis. The same is true for data sharing; instead of sending emails or text messages, you can now collaborate more innovatively and efficiently with all the relevant stakeholders. Compliance monitoring is another case in which existing spreadsheets can be replaced with intelligent workflows and actionable dashboards, providing in-context compliance visibility.

Some might question the possibility of automating security compliance processes.
But many others already enjoy new compliance visibility, efficiency, and enforcement levels.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the above, please feel free to contact us.

 

With the growing complexity of the business landscape, GRC teams are tasked with ensuring that an organization is operating in compliance with relevant laws and regulations as well as managing risks that could impact the organization’s ability to achieve its goals.

Additionally, with the increasing importance of cybersecurity and data privacy, GRC teams play a crucial role in helping organizations protect their sensitive information and prevent cyber attacks.

As regulatory demands continue to evolve, it is increasingly evident that GRC teams face an increasing workload.

What can be done to reduce the workload?

Before we share practical bits of advice, let’s recap today’s key challenges for GRC teams and security compliance professionals:

1. Lack of expertise – There’s a growing demand for GRC professionals who have the knowledge and expertise to navigate the complexities of the regulatory landscape and help organizations implement effective risk management strategies.
2. Risk visibility – In addition to regulatory compliance, GRC teams oversee an organization’s risk management efforts. It includes extensive data gathering, meticulous data analyses, and the ability to identify potential risks stemming from gaps in compliance adherence.
3. Policy enforcement – Implementing controls to mitigate compliance gaps and risks, and regularly monitoring the effectiveness of those controls.

Do more with less

To address the aforementioned challenges and to significantly reduce the required efforts, hear are a few action items you can implement:

1. Automate like there’s no tomorrow – Identify these specific steps in which human expertise is needed and put all your chips on automating the rest. For example, don’t waste your time on data collection and analysis, but do take the time to plan the appropriate remediation path.
2. Seeing is believing – It’s challenging to make the right decision with no data, however reviewing multiple spreadsheets and dashboards is even more time-consuming and tedious. Find a solution that is right for you that allows for a single pane of glass for compliance and provides that in-depth visibility that you need.
3. One size doesn’t fit all – All (wo)men are created equal, but every organization is profoundly different. It’s tempting to download a template or reuse one a friend shared, but a custom-fit process is required to cut costs and save time. Define the main steps in your current process and the tools the team is using, and look for software that will adapt to your terms rather than vice versa.

Overall, the demand for GRC teams is expected to continue to grow as organizations recognize the importance of effective governance, risk, and compliance management.
GRC professionals who are able to do the mind shift to automation and have the skills to implement effective risk management strategies will prevail.

Cypago’s compliance solution accelerates compliance adherence while reducing the workload for GRC teams

You need an intelligent platform that will continuously monitor the overall compliance status and watch your back, regardless of how fast the organization or the cyber threat landscape grows. Cypago is that platform. It serves as a single source of truth for any security standard, offloading most of the heavy lifting from GRC leaders and enabling them to make faster and wiser decisions with unmatched success.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the above, please feel free to contact us.

 

At Cypago, we’re always looking for ways to improve our customers’ ability to seamlessly and effortlessly secure their compliance needs. To achieve this goal, our research and development teams have made some exciting updates to our products.

Here is our latest update:

More flexibility and customization

Using the newly introduced Custom Audit wizard, users can upload their own set of controls into Cypago and enjoy the full range of our built-in automation and analysis capabilities based on a unique implementation of advanced NLP-based algorithms.

New for cloud providers

A significant enhancement is now available for cloud providers’ automated evidence collection, gap analysis and continuous monitoring. This includes an impressive lineup of capabilities, including audit trail logging coverage, bucket versioning and backups, server disk backup encryption, server monitoring, user access keys rotation, user access keys limitation, and much, much more.

 

Deeper SDLC monitoring

Get deeper and more accurate visibility into your secure development lifecycle processes with capabilities extending to deployment notifications, branch protection, branch push and merge access, branch force push and code owner requirement, user SSO enrollment, releases, and environments.

 

 

Updated and expanded controls and requirements

These features were purpose-built to empower superior automation, and enable mappings to all standards, including – but not limited to – SOC 2, ISOs, and HIPAA.

New batch of supported integrations

Cypago can now successfully integrate with newly collected assets such as builds, pipelines, and job configurations, within the Azure DevOps (ADO) space, and supports integration with additional tools such as Freshservice, Curricula, Monday.com, Snyk, and Snowflake.

 

Private cloud tool integration

Cypago now enables advanced GitLab and Jira server collection from your own private cloud premises, including environments, releases, deployment notifications as well as users, groups, and admin permissions.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the above product updates, please feel free to contact us. We will be happy to discuss them with you.

The job of the CISO is extremely important, and ever-evolving. Faced with a rapidly digitizing environment and its subsequently expanding threat landscape, CISOs are the security leaders charged with helping organizations stay ahead of the game, and retain their competitive edge, without falling prey to malicious hackers, ransomware, and other cyber attacks.

CISOs must keep up with industry trends, anticipate cyber risks, and take measures to prevent them from materializing. To do so, they fulfill integral roles in helping organizations build their overall cybersecurity strategies and courses of action. As such, it goes without saying that they must constantly keep updated on the latest innovative tech tools and operational strategies, while remaining fully compliant with all relevant regulatory requirements.

It’s no wonder that, when it comes to implementing and managing cybersecurity programs, CISOs face their fair share of challenges.

Let’s take a deep dive into the top 3 challenges CISOs face, from Cypago’s perspective.

1. Creating and maintaining a comprehensive cybersecurity program that covers all aspects of the organization’s business operations

Over the past decade, organizations have adapted to many new and diverse work models and policies. Today, more and more people are working remotely at least one day a week, requiring network access from multiple locations. Additionally, many companies now employ a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, allowing employees to access internal systems from a personal device, such as a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Coupled with the preponderance of out-of-date devices and corporate systems that should have been updated or decommissioned long ago, as well as a plethora of unpatched vulnerabilities, CISOs often find themselves struggling to build a cybersecurity strategy that ensures protection anytime, and from anywhere.

2. Implementing and managing security controls and technologies that are effective against the latest threats

With increased digitization comes an increase in the volume and sophistication of cyber-attacks attempted against organizations. Those technologies and practices that successfully warded off attacks just a short while ago, have essentially been rendered obsolete. To stay even one step ahead of cybercriminals and their ever-changing threats, visibility is key, but it’s only the starting point. Once they know what they need to protect against, CISOs must identify the most effective security controls and technologies that keep their organizations safe against the latest threats, and then implement and monitor them, to ensure their continued success. To say that this is a cumbersome process is an understatement!

3. Ensuring that the organization’s cybersecurity program is constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of the business.

The cyber threat landscape isn’t the only piece of the puzzle that’s in a state of constant evolution. Businesses across industries are consistently changing as well, in an effort to meet customer expectations, market trends, budget constraints, and employee well-being and satisfaction-related demands.

Above all, CISOs must regularly verify that the organization’s cybersecurity program is aligned with all compliance and regulatory requirements derived from its business goals and objectives. These, of course, tend to evolve over time as well, with new regulations emerging to help protect organizations, their assets, and their customer base. Given the rapid changes and the nature of the regulations, CISOs need to leverage the right tools to deliver on this key liability.

Cypago’s end-to-end compliance solution helps CISOs overcome these main challenges – and others!

You need an intelligent platform that will continuously monitor your overall compliance status and watch your back, regardless of how fast your organization or the cyber threat landscape grows. Cypago is precisely that platform, serving as a single source of truth for any security standard, giving CISOs the peace of mind they need, to make faster, smarter decisions that help them overcome the above main challenges, with unmatched success.

Want to learn more about Cypago’s compliance solution? Visit us >> cypago.com

At Cypago, we’re always looking for ways to improve our customers’ experience and security compliance management capabilities. To that end, our research and development teams have been hard at work on updating our products so that they help make compliance processes that much smoother and more successful.

Here is a brief summary:

Evidence management This will enable you to easily view, identify, export, and handle compliant/non-compliant artifacts.
	Compliance dashboard We’ve launched an updated, extremely powerful dashboard that provide you with actionable insights on your current compliance posture, in one convenient location.
User access reviews This is a groundbreaking innovative tool that was purpose-built to enable you to review, assess, and approve users, permissions, and application access.
	Vendor management This feature creates a single location, from which you can effectively and efficiently manage, assess, and document your vendors and their associated risks.
Audit scope editor Use this feature to add or remove controls from existing scope, annotate ignored ones, assign ownership, and more.
	New batch of supported integrations Cypago can now successfully integrate with the following digital solutions: Gitlab CI, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudWatch, Microsoft Azure, Okta, MongoDB, Terraform, JFrog, Elastic Cloud, JumpCloud, Slack. Many more to come very soon.
Auditor interaction With this new feature, you’ll benefit from streamlined management for the control implementation lifecycle, including snapshots and submissions for audits.
	Risk register Manage, assess, and document your risks in one place, with this efficient feature.
Assets directory Use this directory to gain full visibility of all of your security & compliance-related assets, which will be continuously collected from all connected integrations and stored in a single repository, for easy access.
	Task management Create and delegate tasks for team members and colleagues to mitigate outstanding gaps or deliver new required evidence with greater ease than ever before.

If you have any questions or comments about any of the above product updates, please feel free to contact us.

Security audits can be complex, confusing, and time-consuming. They can also cost an organization a pretty penny. As such, when seeking to sail through IT compliance and security audits, it’s important to identify the difference between how much you’re spending, and how much you SHOULD be spending, to get the security audit results your organization and clients seek and deserve.

To better understand the compliance pricing landscape, let’s overview the direct, indirect, and opportunity loss costs associated with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits.

Direct costs

How much are you spending on consultancy services, auditor fees, and security or IT tools needed to comply with the standard requirements (such as a code vulnerability scanner, for example)?

Numbers for direct costs vary widely, depending on the nature of the organization, the product architecture (SaaS or not), the rating of the auditor (The ‘Big 4’ or others), and the geography.

Indirect costs

These are the sum of all organization resources spent on preparing and running a security compliance process. For example, all the efforts put in by internal teams to define the audit’s scope, collect evidence, analyze and identify the gaps, remediate them, and manage the overall process.

For fast-growing organizations, this can quickly sum up to hundreds of work hours spent by your most expensive and time-limited employees!

Opportunity loss costs

A lack of adequate security compliance can lead to failed business opportunities and subsequent financial loss. In today’s market, given the high sensitivity to data protection and privacy, a SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certification must be made available, to prevent or mitigate opportunity loss costs.

Bottom line: how much does an internal audit cost?

All in all, the overall cost of a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit run manually without any automation can be extremely painful. It can significantly and negatively influence any team’s availability and ability to focus on its business-critical tasks. This is without considering a vital component of audit costs, when it comes to regulated markets: fines applied by the authorities, should any misalignment with regulatory requirements be detected.

Automating security compliance processes has quickly become the leading option for forward-looking compliance managers and security experts. By significantly reducing the overall efforts required in these processes, you can save hundreds of hours every year and experience a major drop in your total cost of ownership.

In the market for a compliance automation solution to reduce your security compliance costs?

Discover Cypago’s end-to-end intelligent compliance solution for any security standard and start orchestrating your startup’s security compliance, today!

If your organization utilizes cloud technologies to collect, store, and share the vast quantities of information handled each and every day, it’s essential that security programs be established to ensure IT compliance. This is not just to maintain a security posture for your organization, but also to demonstrate your security posture to potential customers.

ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are two of the most widely accepted set of controls, and should most certainly be implemented, in many cases. But before taking any active step with these crucial measures, it’s important to understand their added value:

ISO 27001 vs. SOC 2: Main similarities

Standardized communication

ne of the primary functions of both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 is to communicate an organization’s cybersecurity posture to its employees, prospects and/or partners. Both present a standard set of requirements for everyone within the organization to use, creating a common IT compliance language and helping team members avoid any misunderstandings.

Customization for solid security monitoring

Both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 provide a list of requirements organized in domains or categories, covering a wide range of activities within the organization, such as the processes and infrastructure involved in the organization’s various production and operational activities. However, it is important to note that these do not always list the specific controls you need to implement. They often use generic statements that cannot be implemented as-is. For this reason, it is critical to customize the audit scope to fit your specific setup.

The need for an external eye

An additional commonality between SOC 2 and ISO 27001 is their need for an external auditor or assessor. These controls cannot be self-attested and must involve extensive evidence collection and analysis to prove that the controls were implemented correctly.

ISO 27001 and SOC 2 costs

In today’s dynamic market, achieving compliance with either SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is essential to doing business. That means the budget planning and business goals must allocate the resources for a security audit every year.

ISO 27001 vs. SOC 2: Main differences

How long does compliance take?

SOC 2, specifically the Type 2 audit, reviews an organization’s security-related behavior over a period – usually 12 months. Whereas ISO 27001 considers a set of evidence provided to prove the organization’s security posture at a given point in time.

Big picture vs. fine print

SOC 2 exhibits more rigorous and detailed requirements, including implementation details. ISO 27001, on the other hand, tends to focus on process management, policy documents, and primary security-related configurations. For example, you may find a requirement to implement a multi-factor authentication as part of SOC 2, but not necessarily in ISO 27001.

Regional applicability

SOC 2 is much more prevalent in the North-American market, whereas ISO 27001 is dominant in Europe. However, since both have many building blocks in common, adopting the two is regarded as wise.

IT environment

Finally, SOC 2 references cloud infrastructures and tools, while ISO 27001 focuses on a generic IT environment, while its successors, such as ISO 27017, are more cloud-focused. This may be relevant when doing business with European entities, which tend to demand to see cloud-specific standards adopted.

 

Are you ready for powerful IT compliance orchestration that helps you leverage the benefits of both ISO 27001 and SOC 2 to ensure successful security audits?

Discover Cypago’s end-to-end intelligent compliance solution for any security standard and start orchestrating your startup’s security compliance, today! >> https://cypago.com/how-it-works/

For years, organizations have been using security standards and frameworks to organize their security programs and demonstrate their cybersecurity posture to potential customers. However, the increased adoption rate of cloud technologies and the overwhelming challenge in securing these environments have transformed the annual compliance auditing process into a significant pain point.

When it comes to trends in compliance, there’s no such thing as being too prepared with information on ISO 27001 vs. SOC 2. To that end, and as security compliance experts, we’ve prepared the ultimate ISO 27001 and SOC 2 readiness assessment checklist to ensure your startup is maximally prepared for your upcoming IT compliance audit.

Start early, work less

You want your startup to sail through its IT compliance security audits, from Day 1, even before you have a viable product shipped into the markets. Doing so will save you on time and effort in the long run. All your audit essentials, from your SOC 2 monitoring reports to your ISO 27001 certification costs, will all be organized and accessible to the relevant stakeholders.

Align on time limitations

How long does it take to get SOC 2 compliance? It could take six months, which could result in your startup losing a large account waiting for your SOC 2 report before closing a deal. The same goes for your ISO 27001 business continuity plan. It’s critical to ensure all parties involved are aligned on time limitations, to keep the security compliance audit process moving forward and on schedule, as well as to keep expectations in check.

Define the scope of your security compliance audit

As compliance is not a one-size-fits-all process, organizations must make sure the audit scope is customized specifically to their data handling, development lifecycle, and operational processes. Using an automated process, for your ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance can help you understand your audit scope, before the audit is even underway

List key cloud tools

As with every security audit, you must collect many data types to serve as evidence of your organization’s IT compliance. This data comes from the cloud-based tools and infrastructure used across the organization, from cloud platforms and identity access management, to change management tools, productivity tools, and others. Therefore, integrating an automated system that unifies the many data silos within an organization, is key.

Review the current state of your integrated compliance program

Once all the data has been prepared, it is time to analyze it, match it to the relevant controls, and identify any prevalent gaps. You will need to note any deviations from the requirements listed in the SOC 2 or ISO 27001 standard, which are covered in the scope of the current audit. Doing so will help you clarify your startup’s compliance risk map, so that by the time you get to the audit itself, your compliance posture will have improved.

Remediate any identified gaps

Finally, once you have obtained a customized scope, collected and analyzed all data, and identified existing gaps, you must remediate outstanding gaps to ensure your audit is as seamless and successful as can be. Note that this step can be quite complex, but integrating an automated compliance platform can guide you towards efficient and effective risk management and compliance, for the long haul. Are you ready for a zero-touch compliance experience that ensures you’re consistently prepared for every audit? Discover Cypago’s end-to-end intelligent compliance solution for any security standard and start orchestrating your startup’s security compliance, today! >> https://cypagostg.wpengine.com/how-it-works/

Security Certification is a big issue nowadays.
Everyone talks about it; everyone thinks everyone else masters it, but still, only a handful knows how to approach it.

Working with hundreds of organizations, small and large alike, we realized that companies generally don’t understand compliance concepts, master the processes, or even know where to begin. Usually, compliance is perceived as a pain-in-the-neck that must be ‘somehow’ solved and removed from the way.

Let me try and answer some of the basic unasked questions that run in everyone’s minds:

Who should meet security compliance and why?

Practically any company with a software-based offering should comply with at least one security standard. Achieving compliance is imperative to create trust with customers and federal regulators and serves as a solid and field-tested foundation for your security program.

What are the differences between ISO 27001 and SOC 2?

In general, both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 help you verify your company’s security posture and help you establish well-formed and secure processes. However, ISO 27001 exhibits a more process-oriented approach, focusing on people, policies, procedures, and technology. SOC 2, on the other hand, is more rigorous and goes deeper into the intrinsics of security configurations, cloud platforms and SaaS tools settings, development lifecycle security, and more.

What is the difference between SOC 2 type 1 to SOC 2 type 2?

SOC 2 type 1 audit will review your compliance at a specific time; thus, it provides only a limited assurance for your customers. In a SOC 2 type 2 audit, your auditor will review evidence collected over time, usually three months if that is your first audit or twelve months in most other cases. Proving compliance over time elevates your overall security and data handling posture.

What does ISO 27001 clause 5 mean?

ISO 27001 clause 5 requires that the person or group managing the organization demonstrate leadership concerning the core principles of information security by defining the mission statement, strategy, and goals. In practice, it mandates the definition and implementation of an information security policy and the specific properties it should include. It also requires management to assign information security authorities and responsibilities.

What are ISO 27001 and SOC 2 mandatory requirements?

Both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards mandate policies and procedures to reflect the secure nature of people and technology-related operations. On top of that, both standards will require an organization to provide evidence pointing to the adequate implementation of a list of information security controls. In general, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 cover multiple operational categories, including security, confidentiality, availability, and data integrity aspects.

Is there a SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance checklist?

The SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards have formal evaluation criteria, as made available for auditors and auditees by the American Institute of CPA (AICPA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) institute. However, since compliance is not a one-size-fits-all process, it is advisable to leverage an intelligent solution that can generate an audit scope matching your specific IT and operational environments.

Is ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification worth it?

In recent years, the global economy has experienced an exponential rise in cyber attacks on companies and individuals alike. This gloomy reality has brought the federal government and the private sector to require vendors’ highest security assurance levels before engaging in business. The best and most effective way to communicate your cybersecurity posture to prospective customers is to adopt one or more of the abovementioned security standards. One can claim that today, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 have become true business enablers and are part of the cost of doing business.

Want to learn more about the compliance process?

Join Cypago for a webinar “What to Expect When You’re Expecting an IT Compliance Audit”, hosted by Cypago co-founder and CEO Arik Solomon, to learn the basics about SOC 2 and ISO27001 compliance. Save Your Seat!