Nightfall’s data protection & classification platform enables SOC 2 compliance

Security teams that work in highly regulated industries or build solutions for consumers must adhere to compliance controls and regimes required for their business. One of the most important compliance requirements for many companies is the SOC 2 audit. The SOC 2 audit provides detailed information and quality assurance about essential security factors such as the confidentiality of data under your organization's stewardship, privacy controls, and many other standards.

SOC 2 audits are a key requirement in a security strategy. When considering how to improve security around your vendor management, internal governance, and risk management programs, the results of your SOC 2 audit will tell you a lot about what you’re doing well and where you need to improve.

Cloud-native data protection and classification with Nightfall can help your organization achieve SOC 2 compliance by proving your company handles sensitive data properly. The key aspects of SOC 2 compliance are data security, data availability, data processing integrity, data confidentiality, and data privacy. Nightfall identifies where you have risks related to sensitive information exposure in the cloud and gives you the ability to configure and customize data detection policies that meet your organization’s unique needs,

Here’s how to prepare for SOC 2 compliance using data protection for SaaS apps to ensure you pass your SOC 2 audit with flying colors.

SOC 2 compliance starts with data classification policies

Many companies become SOC 2 compliant to showcase their strong security practices for safeguarding their company’s and their customer’s data. During SOC 2 compliance audit periods, auditors validate that security controls are in place with the appropriate triggers and timely responses to assess the strength of an organization’s security posture.

Auditors generally look for a number of controls and processes, like documented information security processes that are managed on an ongoing basis, data classification policies and protocols that detail the security, and handling of customer data.

Meeting SOC 2 controls is easier with Nightfall. Here are steps you can take with Nightfall to ensure your SaaS platforms are SOC 2 compliant:

Configure detection rules that detect sensitive data your business handles. Select from common templates in our library for out of the box coverage.
Enable real-time monitoring on business applications that house sensitive data such as Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, and GitHub.
Implement manual or automated workflows and processes to remediate any findings.
Run historical scans to search for sensitive data that exists in data silos today.
Visualize historical scan results in a custom Nightfall dashboard.
Engage Nightfall’s Managed Services team to facilitate bulk remediation of sensitive data at rest in cloud silos.
Review and export scan results should they be required in the event of an audit.

Nightfall helps define your data security policies and prepares your organization to pass your SOC 2 audit. Our cloud-native data protection platform can also help you enforce data security policies necessary for successfully completing your SOC 2 audit.

Enforcing data security policies for SOC 2

Having a data classification and protection platform can help companies more easily complete your SOC 2 audit. Here are some of the security practices and policies that companies should implement for a strong security posture — and how Nightfall helps achieve these requirements for SOC 2 compliance.

Data classification and management policy

Your company must have procedures to classify data in accordance with classification policies and periodically monitor and update such classifications. To achieve SOC 2 compliance here, companies must clearly indicate how they store and dispose of sensitive data, in a manner that:

Reasonably safeguards data confidentiality
Protects against the unauthorized use or disclosure of the data
Secures or destroys the data

Sensitive data must be validated and protected against unauthorized disclosure or modification, when in use, stored, or transported, to ensure information security and to mitigate risk and vulnerabilities. Nightfall supports this policy by:

Identifying where sensitive data exists in a system or when it enters into an application in real-time.
Leveraging variables such as internal/external visibility and permissions to prioritize findings by risk level.
Providing remediation capabilities.
Fulfilling auditor checks against controls for data classification and information security policies.
Monitoring configuration and alerts to facilitate management and improvement of the classification through our managed services team.

Data retention and disposal policy

Your organization must maintain a process designed to prevent sensitive data from being exposed to unauthorized individuals. Nightfall helps you meet SOC 2 compliance for this policy by:

Providing remediation capabilities for real-time scans.
Enabling companies to operationalize a process to remove or obscure sensitive data.

Password security policy

For SOC 2 compliance, your company should ensure passwords and credentials are not hard coded or embedded in static code. Nightfall ensures this policy is met by allowing your teams to leverage proprietary detectors to intelligently find secrets and credentials across applications, including code repositories and collaboration tools.

Get the help you need for SOC 2 compliance

A data protection platform automates the necessary processes for achieving the proper levels of data security in the cloud. Talk to us about how to get started with SOC 2 compliance or any of the other trust services criteria (TSC) standards and frameworks your organization needs to comply with, like ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and more.

For more information about the Nightfall for securing data within all your SaaS apps and to see a demo, click on the Calendly below to schedule a call with our team.