Trust as an asset: SOC reporting issues that can help, or hinder, building crucial trust

A new blog series shares our perspective on significant SOC reporting issues that are critical to achieving trust and transparency among service providers and their stakeholders

On a typical day, the chief information security officer (CISO) is focused on executing her information security strategy.  However, as the world becomes less typical and more complex and interconnected, she spends more time worrying about significant issues that may affect her organization and how best to communicate with her growing number of stakeholders.  Questions on emerging issues are rapidly coming from the board (Could that cyber breach happen at our company?), her clients (Why did we have a privacy breach? Did we lose any personal data?), and her organization (How do we provide our stakeholders comfort with our digitization strategy - the cloud, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence - to accelerate our business?).  Building trust and responding to stakeholders efficiently and effectively comes with great difficulty. But the organization has implemented a strategy to help identify and assess the impact of new risks. SOC reporting helps the CISO understand the health of the control environment both within her organization and at her third party service providers and encourage confidence with stakeholders.  

Over the next several months, we will share the significant issues our clients are facing and provide our perspectives on how to successfully use trust as an asset to unlock insights with SOC reporting. Such insights can prove invaluable as companies use them to strategically build trust as an asset and bolster their brand and reputation. The following are just a few of the topics we will tackle in our series:

• Demystifying SOC 2 reporting.  How to use SOC 2 reporting to address and reduce technology and operational due diligence concerns
• Efficient SOC reporting testing strategies.  How to test your controls once to support multiple SOC reporting deliverables to exponentially increase your organization’s effectiveness in performing SOC reporting
• Using your SOC reporting as a digital accelerator.  How to implement controls to adequately cover newly digitized processes and address new risks in four steps.

We hope you find these blogs informative and would be happy to address any other issues that are top of mind.  Please comment below to share your ideas for future blogs.