A founder asked me this almost apologetically, like it might be a silly question: "do I need SOC 2 or something like that? A potential customer mentioned it and I have no idea what they're actually asking for." It's not a silly question. It's just one that gets tangled up because the word gets thrown around a lot more casually than what it actually involves.
What SOC 2 actually is
SOC 2 is a formal audit, performed by an accredited third party, that checks whether a company has specific security practices actually in place and consistently followed: access controls, monitoring, incident response, change management, and more, depending on which parts of the audit you pursue. It's not a quick checklist. It typically takes months of preparation and ongoing evidence-gathering, and it's usually a genuinely significant cost, both in money and in process overhead.
Why bigger customers ask for it
When a company asks whether you have SOC 2, they're usually trying to answer a specific question without doing their own deep audit of your practices: can we trust that this vendor has real, verified processes around security, not just good intentions. For an enterprise buyer working with dozens of vendors, requiring a shared, independently verified standard is a reasonable way to avoid auditing every single one from scratch.
Whether you actually need it right now
For most very early apps, the honest answer is no, not yet. The cost and process overhead of a formal audit rarely make sense before you have real revenue and are actually trying to close deals with larger organizations that require it as a condition of purchase. Pursuing it before that point is usually solving a problem you don't have yet, at the expense of time that could go toward the product or the actual customers you can reach without it.
What's actually worth doing regardless
The certificate is a lagging indicator of real practices, not the practices themselves. You can adopt the substance long before you'd ever pursue the paperwork:
- Actual access control: who can reach your production database and admin tools, and is that list something you could name off the top of your head right now.
- A real, if simple, incident plan: if something goes wrong, do you know who gets notified and what the first steps are, written down somewhere, not figured out live for the first time during the incident.
- Basic monitoring: would you actually notice if something unusual started happening, or would you only find out from a customer or a researcher.
- The same access-rule and key-handling checks that have been the core of this whole blog: they're the substance underneath most of what a formal audit would eventually check anyway.
When a specific customer's procurement process genuinely requires the certificate, that's the moment to start the formal process, budgeted and planned as its own project. Until then, building the real habits underneath it costs far less and protects you regardless of whether anyone ever asks for the paperwork.