Many teams are surprised to discover that passing a SOC 2 audit once is the easy part. The real challenge is keeping that compliance posture healthy month after month, year after year—especially as the business grows and the threat landscape evolves.

In other words, SOC 2 (and similar frameworks like ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS) is not a “project.” It’s an ongoing operating model. That’s why it takes so much effort to maintain.

Below, we’ll break down the real reasons why, what’s happening behind the scenes, and how to reduce the operational drag without increasing risk.

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1. Compliance Is Designed to Be Continuous, Not One-Time

SOC 2 is built around the idea of ongoing control effectiveness, not point-in-time checks.

• SOC 2 Type I: Are your controls designed effectively at a specific moment?
• SOC 2 Type II: Are your controls operating effectively over a period (usually 6–12 months)?

Why this matters:

• Your auditor doesn’t just want policies written once; they want evidence that:
  • The policies are followed every time.
  • Deviations are detected.
  • Issues are remediated.
• Even small lapses (e.g., delayed user access reviews, missing logs, skipped backups) can show up as exceptions in your audit report.

Impact on effort:
Maintaining SOC 2 means continuously generating, collecting, and retaining evidence that your controls are working as intended over time—across the entire audit period.

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2. Security Controls Touch Almost Every Part of the Business

Compliance frameworks like SOC 2 are cross-cutting. They touch:

• Engineering & DevOps

  • Secure SDLC, code review, CI/CD controls
  • Infrastructure hardening, patching, configuration baselines
  • Logging, monitoring, alerting, incident response

• IT & Corporate Systems

  • Device management (MDM), endpoint protection
  • Identity and access management (SSO, MFA)
  • Network segmentation, VPNs, and secure Wi-Fi

• HR & People Ops

  • Background checks
  • Onboarding/offboarding processes
  • Regular security awareness and phishing training

• Legal & Leadership

  • Vendor management and DPAs
  • Risk assessments and governance
  • Policies, standards, and governance reviews

• Customer-Facing Teams

  • Handling customer data securely
  • Incident communications
  • Contractual security commitments

Because the control set is distributed:

• Ownership is fragmented across teams.
• Compliance tasks compete with feature work, sales, hiring, and day-to-day operations.
• You need coordination and buy-in from many stakeholders, not just “the security team.”

Impact on effort:
You’re not managing one project; you’re aligning a whole organization to a security baseline and keeping it aligned as people, tech, and processes change.

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3. The Environment Is Constantly Changing

SOC 2 assumes a moving target. Your organization is not static, and each change can affect your control environment:

• New hires and departures

  • Need timely access provisioning and deprovisioning
  • Require onboarding training, NDA signing, and system access governance

• New systems and tools

  • Each SaaS platform or infrastructure change may require:
    • Security review
    • Vendor risk assessment
    • Updated data flow diagrams
    • Updated access controls

• New products and features

  • Can change:
    • What data you collect
    • Where it’s stored and processed
    • Who has access and how it’s protected

• Organizational changes

  • New locations, entities, or business models can trigger:
    • Changes to the scope of your audit
    • Additional controls or documentation requirements

Impact on effort:
Every meaningful change to your tech stack or organization has compliance implications. If you’re not continuously updating your controls, documentation, and evidence, you accumulate “compliance debt.”

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4. Evidence Collection Is Often Manual and Fragmented

SOC 2 maintenance involves proving that your controls work, which usually means:

• Screenshots (e.g., MFA enforcement, security configurations)
• System exports (e.g., access control lists, audit logs)
• Reports (e.g., vulnerability scans, backup status)
• Meeting notes (e.g., risk committee, incident reviews)
• Training records and acknowledgments

In many organizations this is:

• Manual: People have to log in, take screenshots, save PDFs, upload to a shared folder.
• Decentralized: Evidence is scattered across Jira, Slack, Drive, email, and vendor portals.
• Ad hoc: Effort spikes before the audit window, creating disruption and burnout.

Why it feels so heavy:

• Auditors can’t just “trust” you did something; they need artifacts.
• Evidence often needs timestamps, consistency, and traceability for the whole audit period.
• Missing or messy evidence leads to:
  • Extra follow-up during the audit
  • Longer audit timelines
  • Potential control exceptions

Impact on effort:
Without automation, the recurring evidence collection process becomes a constant drag and a scramble every audit cycle.

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5. Controls Need Ongoing Review, Tuning, and Exception Handling

Controls are not “set-and-forget.” Over time, even well-designed controls can:

• Drift from baselines (e.g., configuration changes)
• Become too permissive (e.g., temporary admin access never removed)
• Turn noisy or ignored (e.g., too many alerts and tickets)
• Slow down the business (e.g., overly manual approvals and workflows)

This creates additional workload:

• Reviews and tuning

  • Quarterly access reviews
  • Firewall rule reviews
  • Review of monitoring rules, alert thresholds, and detection gaps

• Exception management

  • Documenting situations where normal controls can’t be followed
  • Risk assessments for exceptions
  • Compensating controls and approvals
  • Tracking and closing exceptions over time

• Remediation and follow-up

  • Addressing audit findings
  • Fixing identified control failures or gaps
  • Verifying and documenting that fixes actually work

Impact on effort:
Effective compliance means continuous improvement. You’re not just running controls; you’re monitoring them, fixing them, and justifying the times they fail.

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6. People and Culture Are Hard to “Automate”

Compliance frameworks like SOC 2 rely heavily on human behavior:

• Employees must:
  • Use strong passwords and MFA
  • Report phishing and suspicious activity
  • Follow policies for data handling and access
  • Attend training and attest to policies
• Managers and admins must:
  • Approve access appropriately
  • Keep systems patched and hardened
  • Respond to alerts and incidents promptly

Challenges include:

• Turnover: New employees constantly entering the system.
• Engagement: Security training and policies can be seen as “checkbox exercises.”
• Policy drift: Actual practices evolve faster than policy updates.

Maintaining a strong security culture demands:

• Regular training that’s kept up-to-date and tracked
• Clear, usable policies integrated into workflows
• Reinforcement from leadership and middle management

Impact on effort:
You can automate tooling; you can’t fully automate people. Maintaining human alignment with SOC 2 controls is a continuous, resource-intensive effort.

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7. The Threat and Regulatory Landscapes Keep Evolving

SOC 2 is guided by the AICPA’s Trust Services Criteria, which are periodically updated. Meanwhile:

• New attack techniques emerge (e.g., supply chain attacks, identity-focused attacks).
• New tools and data types introduce fresh risks.
• Customers raise their expectations around:
  • Encryption
  • Zero trust
  • Vendor due diligence
• Other regulations and standards interact with SOC 2:
  • GDPR/CCPA and privacy requirements
  • Sector-specific rules (e.g., HIPAA, PCI DSS)
  • Contractual obligations

This forces ongoing changes:

• Updating risk assessments
• Adjusting controls and policies
• Rolling out new technical safeguards
• Refining incident response and business continuity plans

Impact on effort:
Staying compliant is not just re-running last year’s playbook. You’re continuously re-aligning your control environment with an evolving risk and regulatory landscape.

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8. Documentation, Policies, and Diagrams Are Living Artifacts

Auditors care not only about what you do but how you document it:

• Policies and standards
• Procedures and playbooks
• System architecture diagrams
• Data flow diagrams
• Asset inventories
• Risk registers and treatment plans

These artifacts must match reality. Over time:

• Systems change, but diagrams don’t.
• Processes evolve, but procedures remain outdated.
• New risks emerge, but the risk register doesn’t reflect them.

To maintain SOC 2, you need to:

• Review policies at least annually, or when major changes occur.
• Keep architecture and data flow diagrams updated with:
  • New services
  • New integrations
  • Changes in data residency or processing locations
• Ensure your documentation is accessible and consistent.

Impact on effort:
Keeping documentation continuously aligned with a dynamic environment takes discipline, process, and time.

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9. Ownership, RACI, and Governance Are Often Unclear

In many organizations, compliance is everyone’s responsibility and therefore no one’s priority.

Common issues:

• Ambiguous ownership for specific controls
• Confusion about who is responsible for:
  • Vendor reviews
  • Risk assessments
  • Incident response steps
  • Evidence collection and storage
• Leadership treating compliance as a “cost center” vs. a core business enabler

Without clear governance:

• Tasks slip through the cracks.
• Deadlines (e.g., quarterly reviews) are missed.
• Security and compliance teams end up chasing stakeholders.

Impact on effort:
Ambiguous ownership multiplies the time spent coordinating, reminding, and firefighting, instead of executing and improving.

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10. Audit Cycles Create Peaks of Intense Work

Even if you embrace continuous compliance, real-world SOC 2 programs often look like:

1. Post-audit cool down: Minimal activity, aside from remediation.
2. Pre-audit scramble: Massive effort 2–3 months before the next audit.
3. Audit window: Constant context switching to answer auditor requests.

This stop-start pattern is inefficient:

• Evidence is re-created instead of captured in real time.
• Institutional knowledge gets lost between cycles.
• The business feels disrupted just when it’s trying to execute on growth or product launches.

Impact on effort:
The “spiky” nature of traditional audit prep can make SOC 2 feel far more painful than if it were treated as a steady, continuous process.

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11. Practical Ways to Reduce the Effort of Maintaining SOC 2

You can’t remove the work, but you can dramatically optimize it. Focus on making compliance operational, not heroic.

11.1 Automate Evidence Collection Wherever Possible

Use tools and platforms that:

• Integrate with:
  • Cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Identity providers (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace)
  • Ticketing systems (Jira, ServiceNow)
  • Code repositories (GitHub, GitLab)
• Continuously collect and store:
  • Access control logs
  • Security configurations
  • Vulnerability scan results
  • Deployment and change records

Goal: Evidence is generated and stored automatically as a side effect of normal operations, not as a separate manual task.

11.2 Build Compliance Into Everyday Workflows

• Bake security checks into CI/CD pipelines (linting, SAST, dependency scanning).
• Use approval workflows for:
  • Access requests
  • Production changes
• Standardize onboarding/offboarding checklists.
• Use SSO and enforce MFA everywhere by default.

Goal: Compliance “just happens” as people do their jobs, instead of sitting on top as extra work.

11.3 Clarify Ownership and Governance

• Define a clear RACI for each major control domain:
  • Who owns it?
  • Who approves it?
  • Who executes it?
• Establish a security or risk committee that:
  • Meets on a set cadence (monthly/quarterly)
  • Reviews risks, control performance, and incidents
  • Tracks remediation items

Goal: Everyone knows their role, and leadership has visibility into the risk and compliance posture.

11.4 Move to a Continuous Compliance Mindset

Instead of “preparing for the audit,” aim to always be audit-ready:

• Schedule recurring tasks:
  • Quarterly access reviews
  • Annual policy reviews
  • Regular vulnerability scans and penetration tests
• Treat audit requests as a byproduct of your ongoing processes, not a crisis event.
• Maintain an up-to-date compliance calendar with owners and due dates.

Goal: Smooth out the workload and reduce last-minute scrambles.

11.5 Keep Documentation Lean, Accurate, and Centralized

• Use a single source of truth (e.g., a wiki or GRC platform) for:
  • Policies
  • Procedures
  • Diagrams
  • Risk registers
  • Control mappings
• Version-control key documents.
• Update docs as part of the change management process.

Goal: Documentation reflects reality and is ready for auditors without major cleanup.

11.6 Invest in Training and Culture

• Provide short, role-specific training instead of generic long courses.
• Incorporate security into onboarding and regular all-hands.
• Reward teams that proactively address security and compliance risks.

Goal: Reduce resistance and human-caused control failures by making security part of the culture.

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12. SOC 2 Effort vs. Business Value

The maintenance effort is substantial, but it’s not just about “checking the SOC 2 box.”

Done well, SOC 2 can:

• Improve your security posture and reduce breach likelihood.
• Enable faster enterprise sales and smoother vendor due diligence.
• Create operational discipline around:
  • Incident response
  • Risk management
  • Business continuity

The key is to treat SOC 2 as a security and governance framework that supports your business strategy—not an annual compliance tax.

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FAQ

Is SOC 2 maintenance harder for startups than enterprises?

Often, yes—but for different reasons:

• Startups: Limited headcount, fast-changing environments, and few dedicated security/compliance resources.
• Enterprises: Larger scope, more systems, complex politics, and legacy tech.

In both cases, the challenge is aligning many moving parts behind consistent controls.

Why does SOC 2 Type II feel so much harder than Type I?

Type I is a snapshot in time; Type II covers your operating effectiveness over months. That means:

• Continuous evidence, not one-time checks.
• More emphasis on process maturity and consistency.
• Higher exposure to drift and failure over the reporting period.

Can we keep SOC 2 with a very small security team?

Yes, if you:

• Automate aggressively.
• Assign clear owners in other departments.
• Use standardized tooling and processes.
• Limit scope where possible (e.g., define a clear boundary for in-scope systems).

You can’t eliminate the work, but you can avoid making it a full-time firefight.

Does maintaining SOC 2 automatically make us secure?

Not automatically. SOC 2 is a strong foundation, but:

• It focuses on controls, not every possible threat.
• It’s as strong as the way you implement and govern it.
• You still need threat modeling, security engineering, and detection/response that go beyond the checklist.

SOC 2 is a baseline and a forcing function, not a guarantee.

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Keeping frameworks like SOC 2 in good standing takes effort because it demands continuous, organization-wide alignment on security practices in a dynamic environment. The teams that suffer the least aren’t doing less; they’re embedding compliance into the way they build, operate, and grow—so staying compliant becomes a byproduct of running a secure, well-governed business.