Most small teams meet SOC 2 the same way: a bigger customer sends a security questionnaire, and somewhere in it is "Please provide your SOC 2 report." You don't have one, and the frameworks look enormous.
The good news is that a first Type I mostly comes down to a short list of things auditors look at early. If these are in place and you can show evidence for them, the rest gets much easier.
- MFA everywhere that matters: your identity provider, cloud console, code host and email. Auditors will ask for a screenshot or an export showing it's enforced, not just available.
- Access you can explain. Keep a list of who has access to production and why, and review it on a schedule (quarterly is common). Remove people the day they leave.
- Code changes that get reviewed. Use branch protection on main, require at least one reviewer, and have CI run before merge. The pull request history becomes your evidence.
- Backups you have actually restored. A backup policy is easy; a dated record of a successful test restore is what convinces an auditor.
- Encryption in transit and at rest. Most managed cloud services do this by default, so the work is mostly documenting which settings you rely on.
- A written incident response plan. Keep it short: who gets called, where you talk, how you decide whether to notify customers. Then run one tabletop exercise and write down what happened.
- Vendor review. List the services that touch customer data, and keep their security reports or terms on file.
None of this needs a big platform. It needs someone to own it, a place to keep the evidence, and a few months of the controls actually running before the audit.
I'm building Attestlane, SOC 2 readiness software for small B2B teams, because I kept seeing founders stall at this exact point. The free assessment at attestlane.to maps your answers to the criteria and shows which of these gaps you have. It doesn't replace the auditor.
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