Fitting incident management into the SOC 2 puzzle

This is a guest post by Luis Gonzalez, Senior Content Marketing Manager at incident.io.

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In today’s business landscape, security and compliance mean everything. 

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Because of this, many modern businesses look towards solutions that will provide customers and prospects with the most confidence and trust. One of these is SOC 2 compliance and attestation. SOC 2 is a marker of solid and consumer-minded companies that want to protect customer data. 

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That said, there are many things that companies can do to best position themselves for a SOC 2—adopting an incident management tool is one of them. 

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An incident management tool can help businesses respond better to incidents and reduce downtime, which falls squarely within the Availability principle of SOC 2. Here, we’ll discuss how you can leverage an incident management platform to obtain your SOC 2 attestation and increase long-term customer confidence. 

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SOC 2 attestation is worth the effort

As we hinted above, getting your SOC 2 is much more than another item to check off on your company’s to-do list. It helps your company out with a whole host of things, such as: 

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Customer confidence

Since SOC 2 attestations require businesses to adhere to defined criteria for protecting consumer data, companies will have to ensure that they’re following best practices when it comes to security. Granted, even with the best shot, incidents can still happen, but at least you’ve put in as many measures to be able to respond to these as efficiently as possible. 

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On the other side of that token, customers can rest easy knowing that, at the very least, companies are putting forth a legitimate effort to protect their data—a small but hugely consequential decision. 

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Industry rapport 

We exist in an age of hyper-competition. Gone are the days of being the only option on the block—now, businesses go up against dozens, if not hundreds, of competitors. 

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So what’s one way to stand out? 

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A SOC 2  showcases your commitment to security. Ultimately, businesses want to work with companies they know and trust. You can make the “trust” part of this equation much more straightforward by getting your SOC 2.  

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Allows you to sell to larger companies

It’s common for enterprise-sized businesses and some SMBs to require SOC 2 documentation as a part of their SaaS procurement process. If you’re in a position to meet the needs of these businesses without a SOC 2, you can very quickly lose the bidding war against companies with the attestation. 

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It makes it easier to obtain other security certifications

Getting one security and compliance certification creates a snowball effect, but that’s a positive. Doing so makes it much easier to obtain subsequent security and compliance certifications since you would have implemented all of the necessary controls and measures. 

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Many certifications have slightly overlapping and, in some cases, identical requirements, e.g., SOC 2 and ISO 27001. 

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What do incident management tools do? 

If your business wants a SOC 2 or related security and compliance certification, you’re likely already searching for an incident management tool. And you may be very familiar with whether a tool like this will help. For those in the latter group, here’s what a dedicated incident management tool can assist you with:

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Ensure outages are resolved as quickly as possible

Many businesses take an ad hoc approach to resolving incidents; in some cases, this works out just fine. But in other cases, this approach leaves businesses liable to more downtime as they scramble to respond tactfully. 

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A dedicated incident management tool solves this problem by giving businesses a streamlined process to follow during incident response. Ultimately, this reduces downtime as outages are resolved faster. 

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Give you actionable insights into incidents 

Incidents may happen, but you may be doomed to repeat them if you can’t learn from them. Incident management tools allow businesses to glean insights into their resolved incidents that they can implement. This way, you can cut down on wholly preventable incidents that come up repeatedly. 

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Give you structure around your incident response process 

We hinted at this earlier, but an incident management tool gives structure to your response process. From the initial declaration to assigning an incident lead and severity down to creating a post-mortem, incident management tools help ensure that you’re following a workflow that works to resolve incidents faster. 

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When one action is completed, you’re prompted to do the next, so you’ll never have to guess the next logical step in the response process. 

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Improve your communications so customers stay in the loop

This is a significant process improvement that often gets overlooked. 

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Sure, incident management tools can help you streamline your incident response for a drastic cut-down in downtime, but they can also improve both your internal and external communications. Let’s break both of these down:

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Internal communications: Let’s use incident.io’s workflow as an example here. When an incident is declared, a Slack channel is created as a place for all communication about that incident to happen. This does away with side channels and consolidates comms into a single location. All actions and updates are visible to everyone on the incident response team. Visibility is essential as a general point, but even more so during the incident response process—an incident management tool helps with this. 

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External communications: Without an incident management tool, getting your external communications in order becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Who’s the incident lead? Who’s on external comms? What’s the issue in the first place? What’s our ETA for resolution? When you know what’s going on internally, you can communicate more clearly and effectively externally. Let’s say you have a system outage that’s causing global disruption of your product. Once you declare the incident and figure out the root cause, you can jump onto Twitter or LinkedIn or update your status page with relevant information to keep customers in the loop. This way, your customers know that they're always in the loop, no matter what's happening.

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So, how does an incident management tool fit into the SOC 2 attestation process? 

Part of the requirements for SOC 2 revolves around availability, specifically disaster recovery and security incident handling—the latter of which an incident management tool can help you with. 

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We’ve touched on most of these throughout this article, but here’s a recap of how integrating an incident management tool can make getting your SOC 2 attestation that much more straightforward. 

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Automated workflows that allow for seamless incident response

We’re all busy and would love to automate many of the manual tasks we do daily. It can help to look for an incident response tool with built-in automation that walks incident responders through the process. For example, you can set up an automation that nudges responders to create a post-mortem as soon as the incident status is set to closed. 

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This way, folks can go through the incident response process as seamlessly as possible since they always know the next step—cutting back on your downtime.

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A simple incident declaration process that loops in appropriate people quickly 

With an incident response tool like incident.io, you can declare incidents very quickly and simply to help you get to the quickest resolution possible. All you need to do is fill out a form with fields like severity and type. To simplify things, you can do all this by typing the /inc command on Slack. 

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And by setting up appropriate workflows, you can ensure that certain folks are looped in when specific parameters are met, e.g., incidents of a certain severity or type. 

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Seamless post-mortem documentation

Documenting your incidents is crucial so you can both keep a track record and learn from them. It’s a highly valuable process that will make your incident response better in the long term. With incident.io, you can automatically generate incident post-mortems with relevant information such as response and resolution times, timeline activity, etc. 

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Deep insights that can highlight vulnerabilities, prompting you to create a more secure product 

When it comes to incidents, the more you learn, the better you can prevent them. Incident management tools like incident.io often provide dashboards that show trends in things like severity types, responding teams, duration, seasonality, and more. These insights can help you minimize or eliminate recurring issues, and ultimately help you create a more efficient process and a better product.

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Looking to get your SOC 2? Check out an incident management tool  

If you’re looking into a SOC 2 attestation to help boost your company’s overall rapport, it’s also worth looking into an incident management tool at the same time. 

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The latter will help you with many requirements to secure a SOC 2 and make your organization more efficient when responding to incidents. While you can get by with an ad hoc approach, it's important to invest in a scalable, efficient process for long-term benefit.

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In the end, if you like the idea of saving time and money, and making your organization more efficient in responding to incidents, then look into a dedicated tool like incident.io.

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‍incident.io helps businesses simplify and take the effort out of incident management. Between automated workflows, deep insights into trends and integrations with over a dozen popular SaaS tools, businesses can save up to seven hours per incident.

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