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SOC 2's Trust Service Criteria
Once you’ve committed to a SOC 2 report, you’re ready to choose your Trust Service Criteria (TSC) categories.
Start by looking at the five categories from your customers’ perspectives:
- What questions do they ask you?
- Are they concerned about uptime and availability?
- Or do they tend to ask more about data protection?
At a minimum, your SOC 2 report must include the Security category, which is called the “Common Criteria” because it provides a foundation for the other four categories. The other four categories—availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy— specify new commitments.
Often, companies will focus on Security the first year and add additional categories over time as their business matures.
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Overview of the Trust Service Criteria (TSC) categories
The Trust Service Criteria consist of 5 categories:
- Security (also known as Common Criteria)
- Availability
- Confidentiality
- Processing integrity
- Privacy
The latest set of Trust Service Criteria, TSP 100 – 2017, includes 33 main requirements (“Trust Service Criteria and Points of Focus”) for the Security category and 28 optional requirements across the other four criteria.
Let’s take a high-level look at each category:
Each requirement should be broken down into 1-5 sub-requirements that describe operational best practices.
Note: In a previous iteration of SOC 2 (for reporting before December 15, 2018), the TSCs were called Trust Service Principles. The acronym TSP is still used in some of AICPA’s formal documentation.
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ROC
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