This blog was updated November 2023.
Cybersecurity is a strategic approach to prioritizing threats that could harm your business or customers. It is all about risk management and establishing trust and credibility. In so doing, it shows that you are thinking through the potential cyber threats and risks and how to protect your business, employees, and customers against them.
In both the B2B and the enterprise spaces, there is a great need for robust cybersecurity measures. These companies have vast networks and exchange critical data essential to their operations and success. Therefore, if you want your SaaS business to be taken seriously by enterprises, getting a SOC 2 certificate is a good idea.
Below, we take a quick look into cybersecurity compliance, how you can achieve it, and why a proactive strategy for cybersecurity is critical to your business.
Why Do SaaS Startups Need to Have Strong Cybersecurity?
Many startups and small businesses have limited visibility of cybersecurity and only see the operational constraints it presents and not the business opportunities it can create. Such narratives are grounded in assumptions such as limited budget and resources and lower risk of data breaches.
Their risk profile could be smaller, but not always. Whenever a small business seeks opportunities to work with enterprise customers, cybersecurity becomes a big deal. Companies that place cybersecurity at the core of their strategy are better equipped to protect their investments, mitigate the risk of data breaches, and implement a security culture throughout the organization and the businesses and customers they serve. In a tech chain, being the weakest link will cost you opportunities because of the security implications you present.
One way to prove your cybersecurity credibility is to pursue a SOC 2 certification.
What Is SOC 2 Certification?
SOC 2, also known as Service Organization Control Type 2, is a voluntary compliance framework established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It is meant for third-party service providers like SaaS companies and gives guidelines on protecting customer data from breaches, security incidents, and other vulnerabilities.
A SOC 2 certification provides concrete assurance to enterprises that the SaaS company they are working with has the necessary security measures to protect their data. Outside auditors assess your capacity to uphold high data security standards based on five trust service principles.
The principles are:
Security
SaaS security best practices must include measures to prevent unauthorized access, theft, or removal of data, software, and other vital assets. SOC 2 auditors may look for security tools such as firewalls, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and intrusion detection tools.
Availability
Availability refers to the monitoring of network performance and availability, site failover (being able to switch your operations to a backup system), and other ways your company handles incidents. SOC compliance terms for availability generally look at the availability of services per the terms of the user agreement or service level agreements (SLAs), which require building inherently fault-tolerant systems that withstand stress tests.
Processing Integrity
What is compliance, in simple words, in the context of processing integrity? It means that the systems are working the way they need to without delays, errors, omissions, or accidental manipulations. The evaluation is based on data inputs, the actual processing, outputs, and how the data is stored and protected.
Confidentiality
Data being erroneously disclosed or accessed will severely hurt your confidentiality levels. Adherence to this principle requires that confidential data be encrypted at rest and during transit. You must have encryption, strong access controls, and other safeguards. In addition, when providing access to confidential data, companies must adhere to the principle of least privilege, granting the bare minimum permission or rights to get the job done but not giving out more information than is necessary.
Privacy
SOC 2 certification requires the collection, storage, processing, and disclosure of any personally identifiable information (PII) adheres to the organization's data usage and privacy policy, along with the conditions prescribed in the Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP). Compliance examples for privacy include access control, multi-factor authentication, and encryption to protect any information that can be used to identify an individual uniquely.