Ask HN: How to be SOC2 Type 2 compliant as a solo-entreprenuer?

I’ll spend some more time replying to this next week, so circle back to this comment; I’m someone who regularly helps people get past these audits, meet the criteria customers are trying to assess with these certifications, and vet startups who don’t have these certifications or budget.

Start by pre-filling your own CAIQ v4 with an earnest “we don’t do this” or “we haven’t even thought about this” attempt: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/cloud-controls-m...

Then read through it and see what you can address immediately (EDR on your laptop, MFA on your cloud environments, etc), followed by role playing your client; “based on answers to this questionnaire, what would I not accept?”

There will be some items you can’t fix.

You’ll soon find out the majority of customers, including banks, governments, defence contractors, crypto startups — simply do not care. If they want to use your product, they’ll work with you.

It may be single-tenancy, it may require architectural changes, it may mean making it selfhosted with a time-bomb, but you’ll be able to address the requirements of the CISO, compliance monkey or executive.

I’ve yet to meet an industry or individual I can’t convince. Even if the product is a hot mess, half baked and radioactive — we’ll deploy it on a VM running inside of a VDI within the customer’s environment, because slopping together a migration path is _so easy_, and those early, highly regulated clients are worth it.

I'm currently at a small startup trying to do ISO 27001. A big issue we run into is that there simply aren't enough people. For example, the processes are built around having one person who writes code, and another person who reviews the written code. That's obviously impossible as a solo dev. You also need an internal auditor, who obviously needs to be separate from the operations team.

If I recall correctly the minimum in a standard setup is 9 roles which cannot overlap. You're going to have a very hard time doing that as a solo entrepreneur, so you'll probably need to find someone who is experienced in making unusual setups like these compliant - which isn't going to be cheap. Even after that there's a pretty decent chance you'll end up needing to hire 3rd-party services in order to be compliant: our "internal" auditor is just some big firm doing it for us.

Not possible in case your clients are not stupid. Any company with SOC2 and <5 people is a red flag.

You might find auditors that would go along but any reasonable client will check your SOC2 report and quality of your auditors.

SOC2 requires tons of paperwork and management and separation of duties with also mandatory roles in your company - never feasible in a one man show.

I was part of several third party risk management audits from a corporate perspective.

We regularly audited and questioned SMBs (and big corps) with regards to their security posture. We knew that small shops wouldn’t be able to be fully compliant to SOC2 Type 2 or have an ISO27001 certified environment. If it was clear that our business wanted the product, we either tried to help the company with the questionnaire or created a risk report that was then signed by the business. In other words: even if your customer asks you to be compliant, you don’t have to be if they care enough about your product.

If you seem intent on getting things right, that’s a big plus. Most of your competitors don’t even know what SOC 2 is.

I've been through SOC 2 Type 2 in a company with ~100 people. I think it'd be in some ways simpler as a solopreneur, but still a lot of effort. You won't require as complex controls and you don't need to communicate between different parts of company, but it'll just be yourself doing it all.

On a positive side, you won't have to do 100% of SOC 2 Type 2. The only required part is security if I remember correctly. And a lot of it is best practices that need to be in place anyway. If you are using an established cloud provider a lot of it is in place through their certifications. Some of the controls can be "silly", but generally not hard to put in place. I'd try to figure out what are the minimum nr of controls required and see if that is doable. Pretty sure auditors will give a discount there if the scope is smaller.

It can be somewhat useful for the company if taken seriously, as it can point out weaknesses in processes. Although I agree with other comments that most of it is a checkbox exercise than something that provides any real guarantees to the client demanding it.

I also don't know if getting through it with <20k $ is something that is feasible. Before doing SOC 2 we relied on the clients' security questionnaires instead, so maybe something to always ask about. Usually they were able to make an exception and allow it, although the % started shrinking over time.

Edit: Also, the auditor makes a difference. Pick one that understands small companies. A corporation auditor will get confused with "segregation of duties" if you are the only person in the company.

As others suggested, as a solo entrepreneur, I recommend not entering this process without a real justification. I passed this SOC 2 type for my startup after securing a deal with a big client. SOC 2 is an ongoing process that involves many documents and workflows you will need to implement in your company. If your clients really insist on proof of security compliance, I will try to find a local PT authority to complete a one-time process with them to obtain this kind of report.

Definitely possible. Start with SOC2-aligned practices and a solid public security page — many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate itself.

Building Email Assassin - helping founders fix email chaos. Published a free 5-step system: atlasoperator.ai/inbox-clear-one-hour (no product pitch, just tactics that work)

Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?

Most early-stage founders don’t start with full SOC2 immediately. You can begin with strong security practices, transparent documentation, privacy policy, backups, access controls, and third-party audits before going for certification.

Mr. Maguire: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word." Benjamin: "Yes, sir." Mr. Maguire: "Are you listening?" Benjamin: "Yes, I am." Mr. Maguire: "AI."

A lot of early stage founders ran into this. Strong internal processes can already build a lot of trust before full SOC2 Type 2.

I doubt it's possible. I'd avoid it as long as you can. It's been a continuous stream of audits for my the company I work for and resulted basically total loss of developer agency.

I went through the process and while it seems it's daunting, it's just a bunch of work and some cash. Once established it's also transformative (or should be) on your ongoing processes and practices. You codify those into a bunch of documents (jesus, that's a lot of documents type of thing) and provide evidence for each; Auditors latch onto those randomly. It's then your job to upkeep documents and evidence which can be helped with tools that have frameworks for those. We use drata and it's really simple and helpful to use.

I don't think you would be able to be compliant as a solo dude though, not easily. A bunch of protocols and practices revolve around governance, handovers, failovers, risk mitigation etc and if you're the only guy there's a hard path ahead. Are you reviewing and approving your own code that goes to production? If things go down and you're the first to call (let's say by automated alerting) and you're not available, who is the next one to call as in what's the documented succession plan or automated remediation.. etc.

Compensatory controls do not strictly require a human, they require mitigation of risk associated with a single human. You'd have to automate a lot of these governances "gates" then. So it would be possible, since evidence you would have to provide is work not org-chart, but it'd be a ton of work.

I went into it thinking I need to answer these 167 documents and provide evidence on an ongoing basis, but it actually also transformed the way we do things. I think for the better. At the end of the day, I also think this can be gamed as probably most certificates, but it's not worth it and transformation you go through makes sense.

My monolith C++ backend passed SOC2 Type 2 without any real efforts from me as a programmer since I was very security cautious when writing code. Nevertheless this whole business is a racket and unless you commit to spending small fortune you will be just fighting windmills no matter whether you are actually compliant. In my case I've developed it for a client so it was their headache. I've just written couple of documents outlining compliance features. but before we got certified we would give clients same documents and that would give us free ride for a while.