How to Leverage your GRC Platform for SOC 2 Compliance

Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 has become a foundational framework for building trust with customers and partners. Developed by the AICPA, SOC 2 evaluates a company’s controls across five Trust Services Criteria (TSC): security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

Unlike more prescriptive standards, SOC 2 offers flexibility, organizations define their own controls based on how they meet these criteria. While this adaptability is a strength, it also means each SOC 2 report is unique and can be complex to manage.

This is where your GRC platform and automation capabilities become essential.

Understanding the SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria

To effectively align your controls, it’s important to understand the TSC pillars:

• Security: Protection against unauthorized access (physical and logical).

• Availability: Systems are operational and accessible as committed.

• Processing Integrity: System processing is accurate, complete, and timely.

• Confidentiality: Data is appropriately protected and classified.

• Privacy: Personal information is collected, used, and retained as agreed.

Each company selects the relevant criteria and implements tailored controls, creating both opportunity and responsibility..

Why GRC Automation Makes SOC 2 Compliance Easier

A well-implemented GRC platform automates repetitive, manual compliance activities while reducing error, accelerating audits, and ensuring that your SOC 2 program remains dynamic and defensible.

The Benefits of Automation:

• Real-time Monitoring: Auditors no longer rely on periodic checks. They can verify compliance through continuous system monitoring.

• Centralized Evidence Collection: Documentation is stored and updated in one place, reducing gaps and time-consuming evidence hunts.

• Fewer Audit Delays: Automation reduces manual tasks and clarifies audit trails, streamlining the review process.

What are the Limits of Automation?

Automation is one of the most powerful tools in modern compliance but it’s not magic. While a GRC platform can drastically reduce manual work and increase efficiency, true compliance still requires strategic planning, organizational buy-in, and informed oversight.

Automation can:

• Schedule control testing

• Monitor system activity

• Collect evidence

• Trigger alerts for suspicious behavior or gaps

But it can’t:

• Define your organization’s risk tolerance

• Write your security policies

• Train employees on secure practices

• Make judgment calls during incidents

In other words, automation enhances your compliance program but it doesn’t replace it. Your team must establish and continuously refine the policies, workflows, and decision-making processes that automation supports.

A platform like StandardFusion works best when it’s integrated with a strong security culture. It enables your team to focus on strategic priorities such as maturing your risk management or improving vendor oversight while ensuring the operational side of compliance is handled reliably in the background.

What to Look for in SOC 2 Automation Tools

When it comes to choosing an automated GRC platform to help ease your journey toward SOC 2 compliance, not all tools are created equal. Ideally, you want a solution that doesn’t just check boxes, but actually simplifies your day-to-day workflow and reduces your risk profile. Here are some key features you should consider before making a decision:

• Data Isolation: Opt for a platform that guarantees your data remains segregated from other customers meaning, your data isn’t rubbing shoulders with anyone else’s in the same database. This approach helps strengthen confidentiality and minimizes the likelihood of cross-client exposure.

• Continuous Monitoring: Gone are the days of manual, periodic checks. Your tool should automatically monitor controls and flag any deviations in real time. Whether it’s identifying incomplete onboarding, lingering vendor access, or missed policy updates, the system should catch and alert you before small missteps become compliance headaches.

• Automated Evidence Collection: The less time you spend chasing screenshots and assembling folders, the better. Look for automation tools that gather, organize, and even generate compliance evidence and reports on demand making audits far less daunting.

• Scalability for Growth: As your business adapts and grows, so should your compliance capabilities. Choose solutions that support multiple frameworks (HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, etc.), so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time you expand into new markets or requirements.

• Streamlined Onboarding and Offboarding: Employee transitions can easily introduce risk. The right tool will automate these processes such as tracking policy acknowledgements, training completion, and access changes to ensure nothing slips through the cracks during personnel changes.

• Vendor Oversight: Your compliance doesn’t stop at your doorstep. Effective automation software should allow you to manage third-party vendors, monitor their compliance status, and flag potential gaps.

• Prebuilt Policy Templates: Staying on top of shifting best practices and regulatory requirements can feel overwhelming. Platforms that offer regularly updated, auditor-approved policy templates can give your compliance program a running start and help avoid reinventing the wheel.

• User-Friendly Experience: Compliance shouldn’t require an advanced degree in software engineering. Prioritize tools with straightforward dashboards, customizable features, and responsive support teams so your staff can actually use the tool with confidence.

• Access to Compliance Expertise: Things change quickly in the compliance landscape. Having access to knowledgeable support can make the difference between a smooth audit and a stressful scramble.

• Transparency and Trust: Ultimately, your software should reinforce your organization’s trust posture. Look for platforms that are upfront about their own security practices, provide deep visibility into your compliance status, and support integrity throughout your information ecosystem.

Selecting a tool with these features not only streamlines your path to certification but also helps you build a culture of compliance that grows with your organization.

Key Capabilities to Leverage in Your GRC Platform

1. Build a Strong Security Foundation

Before automation can support compliance, your baseline security program must be sound. Use your GRC platform to document:

• Encryption and access control protocols

• Incident response policies

• Firewall and system hardening procedures

This foundation ensures that automated controls have clear direction and relevance.

2. Enable Continuous Monitoring

SOC 2 isn’t a one-time check; it demands ongoing visibility into your systems. A GRC platform should:

• Monitor user access, system changes, and control effectiveness

• Alert you to gaps—like a missed control test or an inactive user with admin access

• Provide historical records to show consistent oversight

Baseline normal activity so that anomalies become easier to detect and respond to quickly.

3. Set Smart, Actionable Alerts

Customize alerts to match your organization’s risk profile and compliance needs. For example:

• Unauthorized access attempts

• Modifications to sensitive configurations

• Missed security training or overdue control reviews

Avoid alert fatigue—configure alerts to trigger only for meaningful anomalies.

4. Track Action Items and Enable Corrective Response

SOC 2 requires not just monitoring, but action. Your platform should:

• Assign and track responsibility for incident response

• Maintain logs that show what happened, who handled it, and what was done

• Help you learn from incidents and prevent recurrence

Corrective actions should be clearly linked to specific controls and updated continuously.

5. Leverage Audit Trails

Audit trails are essential for accountability. Your GRC platform should provide:

• Full visibility into who accessed what, when, and why

• Historical logs of system changes

• Documentation of control test results, exceptions, and resolutions

This transparency improves audit readiness and internal trust.

6. Automate Evidence Collection

Automated evidence gathering saves time and improves accuracy. Look for tools that:

• Pull screenshots, logs, and reports automatically

• Organize artifacts according to SOC 2 criteria

• Allow you to export auditor-ready documentation on demand

This not only speeds up audits but ensures consistency across reporting periods.

Be Standard-Agnostic to Future-Proof Your Compliance

While SOC 2 may be your current priority, it’s rarely your last. As your organization grows, expands into new markets, or takes on enterprise customers, you’ll likely need to comply with additional standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, or NIST. That’s why it's critical to avoid a siloed approach to compliance.

A forward-thinking GRC platform should allow your organization to be standard-agnostic. Meaning your internal controls can be mapped across multiple frameworks. Instead of building separate programs from scratch each time you face a new audit, you can:

• Reuse existing controls that already meet similar requirements across different standards (e.g., access control, encryption, incident response).

• Avoid duplicating effort, saving time and reducing confusion for both compliance teams and auditors.

• Maintain consistent policies and processes, ensuring that security is embedded into your operations and not just built around individual frameworks.

This level of flexibility transforms compliance from a reactive effort into a strategic, scalable advantage. It also empowers you to respond quickly when privacy laws or regulatory expectations shift without the cost of overhauling your entire compliance program.

With a centralized GRC solution like StandardFusion, you can manage your risk and compliance posture holistically while preparing for whatever frameworks come next.

How Automation Reduces Risk and Cost

Compliance is often seen as time-consuming and expensive but automation can flip that narrative. When implemented properly, a GRC platform minimizes risk and reduces the operational cost of staying compliant, especially with rigorous standards like SOC 2.

Minimizes Human Error

Even highly skilled teams make mistakes such as missed control tests, outdated access rights, overlooked alerts. Automation provides a layer of consistency and accuracy, catching deviations in real time. For example, if an employee’s access isn’t revoked after offboarding, the system can detect and escalate the issue before it becomes a security liability.

Streamlines Workflows

Manual compliance processes like collecting evidence, tracking policy acknowledgments, or managing corrective actions can bog teams down. With automation, these tasks are handled seamlessly, freeing your staff to focus on more strategic activities like risk assessment, internal education, or framework expansion.

Reduces Audit Costs

Faster evidence collection, better documentation, and clearer audit trails reduce the time auditors spend digging for answers. This lowers audit preparation time and the potential need for costly outside consultants or remediation support. Plus, auditors appreciate clean, centralized systems, it builds trust and shortens the audit timeline.

Scales with Growth

As your business expands, compliance becomes more complex but automation makes it manageable. A strong GRC platform should support control mapping across multiple frameworks, enabling you to meet new requirements (ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR) without starting from scratch. Reusing and adapting controls across standards ensures long-term scalability and saves countless hours.

Ultimately, automation enables a smarter, more agile approach to compliance, helping your organization reduce risk, stay audit-ready, and control costs as you grow.

Final Thoughts

SOC 2 compliance is a living, breathing process. It requires not just tools, but a strategy. By investing in a GRC platform that supports automation, continuous monitoring, and flexible control mapping, you position your organization to achieve and maintain SOC 2 with greater confidence and lower overhead.

GRC software doesn’t just check boxes—it makes compliance a sustainable, scalable part of how you operate.